More performance figure for Intel’s i7-6700K have been leaked ahead of its launch. Published by cpu-monkey, these benchmarks offer some insight into Intel’s upcoming 14nm Skylake microarchitecture. The i7-6700K is set to be Intel’s top mainstream chip for Skylake and is set to replace the i7-4770K and i7-4790K based on Haswell 22nm. From cpu-monkey’s data, the 6700K is set to clock between 4-4.2Ghz, which is slightly lower than the 4790K (4-4.4Ghz). Surprisingly, TDP has gone up a tad back to the old 95W standard. As expected DDR4 is supported and a new LGA 1151 Socket is required.

Benchmarks tested include Cinebench R11.5 64bit and R15, Passmark CPU and Geekbench 3 64bit. Overall the i7 6900K pretty much follows the same trajectory Intel has been on in terms of IPC over the last few generations. Throughout all of the tests, the i7-6700K posted a strong 9% gain over the i7-4790K, which is actually pretty good considering the jumps between Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and Haswell never really reached those levels. This means there will be quite a sizable IPC gain Sandy Bridge and older systems and even Ivy Bridge users might be tempted.

An interesting note is that Skylake is rumored to support both DDR3 and DDR4 so there is no way to know which memory system these tests were run on. Using faster DDR4 could have skewed the results for the 6700K, meaning the real IPC gains might be lower if the DDR3 used by the 4790K was also used as well. Higher memory bandwidth kits for Haswell can boost performance by as much as 9% in some cases, so it may be premature to attribute all of the performance gains to IPC improvements just yet. It will also be interesting to see how much overclocking headroom there will be on Intel’s new 14nm platform. If Skylake does not OC well, there will be less incentive for those running on golden chips to upgrade. Hopefully, we’ll have more information to bring you as Skylake nears launch.