Intel's next generation Skylake processors will be debuting at Gamescom 2015 according to a report by DigiTimes. The source in question is relatively reliable and the dates mentioned are sometime between 5th August to 9th August. The Gamescom event will be held in Cologne, Germany and will be host to multiple announcements from various companies.

Intel's Skylake lineup reportedly launching at Gamescom

Skylake's enthusiast desktop side should come in two flavors: namely the Core i5 6600K and the Core i7 6700K. Both chips will be Quad core, with the later supporting Hyper Threading. The socket in question is the LGA 1151 socket with Intel's Z170 Express chipset to allow CPU oveclocking. Both DDR3 and DDR4 will be supported making Skylake serve as the trasition point between the two memory standards. Other SKUs that are thought to be launched soon after include include i7-6700/6700T, Core i5-6600, 6500, 6400, 6600T, 6500T and 6400T, and H170, B150 chipsets and H110 chipset.

The Skylake uArch will succeed the Broadwell micro-architecture on the 14nm process. It will be the tock step in Intel's tick tock cycle and the 10nm die shrink will be codenamed Canonlake. The H110 chipset is expected to arrive by 27th September while the H170 and B150 chipsets will follow shortly after the official release of Z170. We have already seen quite alot of Z170 motherboards so our readers should have a decent idea of what to expect. The only thing that remains to be seen is the IPC performance increase of the Skylake uArch. The Purley platform was leaked a few weeks ago and had some very good indicators about a proper uArch upgrade with the glitches of Broadwell 14nm ironed out.

Notebook versions of Skylake processors are planned for the fourth quarter of 2015 and Intel's notebook reference design for the Skylake platform includes support for USB 3.1 Type-C ports. The Skylake architectural jump is supposed to be very big with significant IPC gains. While gains like these are usually not very apparent on the desktop side (TDP and diminishing returns per increasing clock), it could prove to be a very disruptive uArch on the mobility side. The only apparent problem so far being the power hungry nature of the node. Still, Intel is maintaining an absolutely top-level of secrecy as far as any SKL item is concerned so I for one am definitely expecting something major with Skylake’s release as opposed to just another ‘Haswell’.

