Intel’s Skylake Official Reveal – Pricing & Availability

The curtain has finally lifted and it’s that magical time when we can finally divulge all of the interesting details on Intel’s latest and greatest CPU architecture, Skylake. From the top-end desktop parts that were released a couple of weeks back, down to the low-power and low price counterparts. There are even details on the soon to be released Xeon mobile processors, to boot.

On the desktop side of things, there are two main sets of CPUs, standard desktop parts which follow traditional naming convention, and its low power range (35Watts) with a T extension. Both sets use the new LGA1151 socket type. Nearly all CPUs in this list make use of the latest integrated graphics, HD 530; there are 24 Execution Units (EU) in a normal 530. The only exception is the G4400/T which use HD 520. It’s worth noting that so far, none of the desktop parts use Intel’s much faster Iris graphics cores, which is slightly disappointing.

Prices are per thousand, boxed, with realistic retail prices varying considerably. Keep an eye on Newegg to get an idea of availability; as new CPU types are added, prices should drop as availability increases.

You can see that the overclock friendly K series chips forgo the extended instructions used in vPro, and have a much higher power envelope. Unfortunately, there is no word on a overclockable i3-K series chip, which would have been amusing to test out (dual core with a huge power envelope, 5GHz on air? Guess we’ll never know).

Intel’s focus this time around hasn’t been about major performance improvements, but performance per Watt. Using the same 14nm architecture as Broadwell, but with adjustments to the architecture. Deep sleep states, faster switching between states, broader scaling of clock speeds, and giving its GPU yet another boost in performance. The dual memory standard helps too, supporting both DDR3L and DDR4.

The GPU has most of the interesting details as it’s Intel’s first DX12 IGP, complete with hardware encoding and decoding of HEVC – that’s h.265 to you and me. This is only with QSV (Quick Sync Video) at this time, so HandBrake for encode and a few decoder libraries for playback.

It’s the mobile CPUs that have the Iris and Iris Pro IGPs (mostly 15-28W TDP chips), each with up to 72 EU cores, They can be coupled with eDRAM (dedicated on-die memory, rather than system RAM) which can increase performance three-fold. This can lead to some serious GPU performance gains and will likely give AMD a run for its money with its APUs – at least until it brings HBM to its APUs.

The low power desktop parts run on half the power, but with a 30% reduction in clock speed, making them extremely efficient CPUs. However, from a price/performance ratio, they are not as good as the standard desktop parts.

The new mobile Xeon parts are actually not much different from the other high-end mobile parts. The only thing that stands out is that the standard mobile parts use the HD 530 IGP, while the Xeons use a variant called HD P530 – the P denoting Professional. This is likely a driver level switch for the certifications and CAD enhancements. As to what enhancements the drivers can provide, we’ll have to wait until we can get our mits on a system to benchmark.

With some of the more technical details, Skylake made adjustments to its memory management; faster miss handling (for cache look ahead), a larger out-of-order window and more scheduler entries. All of these features mean it can better handle threading and data pre-fetch – real-word performance gains are subtle though, typically 5-10% gain over Haswell, or 2-5% over Broadwell. Details of which can be found in our i7-6700K review.

All around, Skylake is about efficiency, better handling of existing resources, and solidifying the architecture, while shifting more of the on-die resources to the GPU. Keeping power envelopes down and performance up is always tricky, so Intel aimed at maintaining performance similar to the last gen, with just more emphasis on lower power. Through the press release information, Intel makes a lot of mention to improvements from 5-year-old systems. This is Intel’s not so subtle way of saying it’s time for Sandy and Ivy Bridge users to upgrade their systems.

Availability is fairly simple – this year or next. Yup, Intel is that specific. High-end and midrange desktop parts will be available 3rd and 4th quarter this year, along with high-end mobile parts. Low-end desktop and midrange mobile is due early next year, although this is likely up to OEM providers as to specific dates. We will be seeing the first generation mobile Xeons this year, and there’s a fair bit of excitement around that with Lenovo already announcing its plans.

Personally, I really want to see a Skylake NUC with Iris Pro graphics; modern games at 1080p, rendered on something no bigger than a fist, especially if it’s overpowered.