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Intel launches Skylake line of Processors! See whats new!
Intel's Skylake Processors:
Intel has unveiled its mainstream 6th-Generation Core silicon, and you've got questions: How does it differ from its "Haswell" and "Broadwell" predecessors? What's the graphics story? How about overclocking? Here are some early answers.
Intel officially launched its 6th-Generation Core (a.k.a. "Skylake") microarchitecture, and the full family of new mainstream chips that use it. This family comprises a broad range of CPUs for mobile devices, laptops, and desktops alike. And Intel says these new chips will deliver new levels of performance across a swath of applications, from standard processing needs in wee devices like tablets to 4K encoding/decoding and gaming in mega-towers and the biggest laptops.
The CPUs announced today join the Core i7-6700K, the high-end (four-core, eight-thread) desktop chip that was unveiled at Gamescom in early August, and the slightly more modest Core i5-6600K (four-core, four-thread), which was announced at the same time. (Hit the link for our review of the top-end chip.)
There’s a lot about Skylake that’s different from previous Intel processor families. Here’s a quick glimpse about what’s changed, and why it may matter to you.
1. Skylake sports big differences from the ground up.
At the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco in August, during his deep dive into the Skylake microarchitecture, Intel Senior Principal Engineer Julius Mandelblat explained that Skylake started off as a relatively modest upgrade and ended up rather more significant. This was due, in part, to the realization (or perhaps, acknowledgment) that mobile usages would necessarily play a bigger role than ever.
As a result, certain Skylake SKUs will end up being a good match for small-form-factor (SFF) systems, and Intel says we should also expect to see massive changes in power usage, energy efficiency, security, and performance versus previous generations. All while it offers a bevy of glittering new features, both technical and practical: increased chipset I/O throughput, superior support for higher-resolution displays (as well as faster DDR4 memory and more PCI lanes), an upgrade to the audio digital signal processor (DSP) and the addition of an integrated camera image signal processor (ISP), and plenty more.
What’s more, segment optimization with the chip design itself allows for fully optimized server and client configurations. That's one of the factors making it one of Intel’s most customizable microarchitectures to date.
2. Skylake splits the family tree.
Intel has divided its new passel of mainstream Skylake CPUs into four series, aimed at specific usage models.
The lowest-power family is the Y-Series. It's meant for 2-in-1 (laptop/tablet) convertible systems, straight-out tablets, and the Intel Compute Stick. (The link will take you to a review of the first-gen Stick; Skylake-based models are planned.)
Here's a look at some of the Y lineup...
We'll get more into the Core M line and its new designations in a bit.
The next step up is the U-Series, which is intended for thin-and-light notebooks, all-in-one desktops, computers using the new Mini PC form factor, and stay-in-place machines for venues like conference rooms. We'll see initial U chips in several power-consumption levels, in flavors from Pentium all the way up to Core i7...
Top of the line for mobile is the 45-watt H-Series; expect to see it in heavy-duty gaming machines and mobile workstations.
Finally, the S-Series, containing traditional Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 chips, as well as vPro Core i5 and Core i7 models, is all about desktops, whether tiny or towering. (We don't have a grid for that series yet.)
One interesting change from previous generations of Intel CPUs is that the lower-end Core M chips are now getting their own naming scheme, to help people better determine where performance falls within the Core M line itself. But you won’t have to learn an entirely new routine, as it’s based on one you already know: The new chips are called (in order of performance, from lowest to highest) Core m3, Core m5, and Core m7.
Intel makes some lofty promises about these chips, saying, for example, that a Core m7-6Y75–based tablet could be twice as fast as an Apple iPad Air 2, and offer 40 percent better graphics performance than one built on one of the most commonly used Core M chips of the last generation, the Core M 5Y71—all while also supporting new features like USB-C and the newer RealSense R200 camera. (For more on RealSense, see "Why RealSense May Be a Mixed Blessing for Intel" on our sister site, PCMag.com.)
3. With Skylake, power should be no problem on any device.
As should be the case for any chip intended for mobile applications, Intel has constructed the mobile members of the Skylake family to have the most efficient power usage to date, and to work in just about every kind of system imaginable. This comes by way of a raft of features that introduce optimizations in almost every system on the chip. As a result, various chips using the Skylake microarchitecture can operate at anywhere from 4.5 watts (the Y-Series) to 91 watts (Xeon).
According to Intel, Skylake mobile processors are its most efficient yet, running up to 60 percent faster and using up to 60 percent less active power. On a 38-watt-hour battery, Intel claims, a laptop using its new Core m7-6Y75 chip can play a full HD video for up to 10 hours. We'll see, once Skylake-based test machines start rolling in over the coming weeks.
4. Where the power comes from is changing.
Skylake introduces some interesting technologies to shore up the new chips in some crucial areas. One of the biggest and most important is one that helps Skylake attain its excellent power usage: a technology Intel is calling "Speed Shift" (not to be confused with SpeedStep).
This is a new, more responsive style of power management. It gives the hardware more direct control over the full spectrum of power states, rather than just the base frequency and the Turbo Boost frequency. In earlier chips, the operating system handled power management at other, lesser frequencies. Speed Shift also adds new power domains, System Agent and eDRAM I/O.
5. Skylake boasts many performance improvements over previous-generation platforms.
Intel claims that Skylake chips will supercharge many regular computing tasks, especially when compared with systems from five years ago. To start with, the company says Skylake mobile chips can deliver up to 2.5 times faster processing performance, 30 times better graphics performance, and three times the battery life of earlier generations of chips. (The company’s numbers for these claims are based on comparing a Skylake-based Core i5-6200U with the Core i5-520UM of the "Westmere" family, from 2010.)
The desktop performance gains don’t look to be quite as impressive, however—up to 60 percent better processing performance, six times faster 4K video transcoding, and 11 times better HD graphics performance (again, comparing the new Core i5-6500 to an early-2010 CPU, the Core i5-650).
6. Don’t forget: It's bringing on memory changes, too.
Because more products on the market use embedded DRAM (eDRAM), Skylake includes a special cache architecture designed especially for it and lets it expand on the capabilities that were first seen in "Haswell" (4th-Gen) and "Broadwell" (5th-Gen) chips. Intel calls this new architecture a "memory side cache," in which the eDRAM is located between the system agent and the integrated memory control. In addition to making the eDRAM fully coherent, so it can cache data from the CPU and the GPU, it allows the caching of display surfaces and faster C-state transitions. The eDRAM is more flexible, too, as it can now be sized as either 64MB or 128MB, something that makes it potentially usable in a greater number of laptops.
On a more basic level, the release of the mainstream Skylake chips bring with it wholesale support for wider-bandwidth DDR4 memory, for the first time in consumer-grade desktops and laptops. That will usher in the first DDR4 SO-DIMMs for mobile use, and bring DDR4 full-size DIMMs to the desktop mainstream. (Before this, DDR4 was in use only in server environments and with the Intel X99 desktop platform, which was the platform that supported the Haswell Extreme Edition and the few other LGA2011 v3 chips.)
7. Skylake does Windows (of course).
"The launch of Windows 10 last month marked 21 years of collaboration between Intel and Microsoft," said Shiv Haushik, general manager of Intel’s Windows OS division, at IDF. So it was no surprise that the official line is that the best PCs are those that use both Skylake and Windows 10. That's not a necessity, of course, but there are a fair number of features in the hardware that have direct, useful analogues in the software, and vice versa.
Take, for example, the new Disconnected Modern Standby (DMS) power state, which builds on the Connected Modern Standby state introduced in Windows 8.1. Without a Wi-Fi connection, and with even less frequent software execution, it can reportedly preserve power for even longer—more than a week, in some cases. Or, of course, the digital assistant Cortana: Windows 10 allows for the integration of a hardware DSP-based "keyword spotter" for easily communicating with Cortana; Skylake supports hardware offload for voice activation. And Intel’s new RealSense F200 camera supports full biometric authentication for use with the Windows Hello personal security function.
Additional capabilities having to do with security and USB-C are implemented in both Windows 10 and Skylake, as well.
Will most users ever notice this kind of integration, at least as it’s implemented? We’re guessing that’s pretty unlikely. But given that Skylake processors are about to flood the market (and Windows 10 machines) anyway, chances are that probably won’t matter much one way or another. You'll just appreciate the benefits of it going forward, without realizing who or what the enabler was. In some cases, it will have been a bit of Intel and Microsoft collaboration.
8. Skylake is primed for pixels.
As Intel’s "all-purpose" family (rather than a boundary-pusher like chips in its Extreme Edition lines, such as the Haswell-based Core i7-5960X), the 2015 Skylake releases will include integrated graphics on all its chips. Specifically, for now, that will be the new Intel HD Graphics 500 Series (sometimes referred to as "Gen9").
Much was made at IDF of the ability of this graphics system to run as many three 4K monitors at once, even with demanding tasks, and that’s definitely one of the features Intel has been touting about Skylake. Intel was demoing triple 4K gaming on Skylake, but we'd have to imagine that this was powered by discrete cards...
And the 4K fun may not stop there: Intel says that transcoding a 4K video can be up to 20 percent faster using the new graphics, too. (This is compared with a chip from just last year.) Among the other features in the 500 Series: support for Windows 10 technologies such as DirectX 12, OpenCL 2.0, OpenGL 4.4, and Vulkan; a new compiler stack; lossless color compression; HEVC/H.265 encode and decode capabilities; and a low-power AVC/H.264 encoder.
We’re still waiting to see how all this goes in our own tests, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see some substantial improvements even over what we saw with Broadwell. (For more on Skylake's graphics, check out "IDF 2015: Intel unveils Skylake’s new GPU architecture" on our sister site, ExtremeTech.)
9. Mobile overclocking just got easier.
Attention gamers and/or tweak-happy power enthusiasts: You may have a good reason for getting a laptop, after all. Skylake will be behind the first-ever mobile processor with an unlocked overclocking multiplier, so you can tweak the chip’s performance to the extent of your bravery (and your laptop’s cooling capabilities). This feature is limited to just one chip right now—the forthcoming quad-core 2.7GHz Core i7-6820HK—but expect that to be just the beginning. Overclocking will probably always be harder on a laptop than a desktop, but at least now it will be a little less hard.
Meanwhile, desktop overclocking is not being left by the wayside. In addition to simplifying BIOS-based overclocking, Skylake is showing some early promise. At IDF, Intel took great pride in showcasing desktop overclocking using the Core i7-6700K—the company’s own gurus had managed to overclock the 4GHz chip to just barely shy of 7GHz, a gasp-inducing achievement...
Most ordinary users won’t be able to accomplish this themselves—especially without easy access to the copious quantities of liquid nitrogen that Intel had—but it hints at the possibilities.
We were able to get decent overclocks on the i7-6770K on a basic watercooling kit, as our review detailed.
10. Expect to spot Skylake as far as the eye can see.
Though the new Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, and Core m3, Core m5, and Core m7 processors are launching Sept. 1, it’s just the beginning of a lengthy release process. Starting in Q4 of 2015 and stretching into 2016, the chips we’ll see will include server-oriented Xeon; four vPro chip SKUs (Core i5, Core i7, Core m5, and Core m7); and Pentium and Celeron variants. The latest incarnations of Intel’s Iris and Iris Pro Graphics should be out in the same time frame, too. So expect to see Skylake-based chips into the new year, taking over the mainstream in computing devices from small to large. Stay tuned as the first Skylake-based mobile systems start to hit our lab later this month.
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