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Intel's Skylake Architecture Reviewed
Vigile writes: The Intel Skylake architecture has been on our radar for quite a long time as Intel's next big step in CPU design. We know at least a handful of details: DDR4 memory support, 14nm process technology, modest IPC gains and impressive GPU improvements. But the details have remained a mystery on how the "tock" of Skylake on the 14nm process technology will differ from Broadwell and Haswell. That changes today with the official release of the "K" SKUs of Skylake — the unlocked, enthusiast class parts for DIY PC builders. PC Perspective has a full review of the Core i7-6700K with benchmarks as well as discrete GPU and gaming testing that shows Skylake is an impressive part. IPC gains on Skylake over Haswell are modest but noticeable, and IGP performance is as much as 50% higher than Devil's Canyon. Based on that discrete GPU testing, all those users still on Nehalem and Sandy Bridge might finally have a reason to upgrade to Skylake.
Other reviews available at Anandtech, Hot Hardware, [H]ard|OCP, and TechSpot.
Of course, the biggest monster jump didn't make it in:
http://wccftech.com/mainstream...
So there might not be very dramatic bumps to be had even with updated libraries/compilers/etc.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I just wish that Intel would make a version that's 8 cores instead with lots of cache rather than waste the space and power on the integrated graphics. If you are gaming with it then you would have a dedicated card since all IGPs pretty much suck, and if you aren't gaming on it there isn't much point to improving it since even the most basic IGP can run video and 2d applications just fine.
Yeah, I thought it was really suspicious when Microsoft heavily promoted the new version of their operating system. Then when hardware manufacturers kept on including wifi and bluetooth in their hardware, without the need for an external card, I knew the only possible explanation was a massive snooping campaign by the NSA.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
My next CPU is sooooo going to be an AMD.
I just built a system with an AMD CPU, but the latest Haswell i5 with four cores is faster than it is. Skylake should beat it into a corner.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Are you kidding? As an owner of several Sandy Bridge systems there is no reason to upgrade.
Heck. I still have two Core i7-920 systems at work and I'm not touching them, they work just fine running Windows 10.
Intel hasn't had competition from AMD in years and this is the result.
If you're on Sandy Bridge or newer, don't bother unless you really need the new chipset features.
Benchmarks of course show a small gain, but in the real world I suspect you could do a blind test of Sandy Bridge next to Skylake and you couldn't tell the difference.
Anyone who needs the performance difference shouldn't be on either chip, if you do serious image/video editing, you should be on Xeon anyway with 8+ cores if you make a living doing such work. The cost of such a system is trivial compared to the cost of the employee doing such things.
I have several systems in my office, ranging from a single Q6600 machine and two Core i7-920 machines all the way up to a Haswell Refresh i7-4790k. The difference in general Windows performance between all those machines is minor. Games play, more or less, the same in anything Sandy Bridge or newer, and we don't do anything so intensive to require more power.
Come on AMD, get back in the game so Intel has some real competition. Since Core2Duo came out, you haven't been coming to the party.
https://01.org/linuxgraphics/i...
"No reverse engineering, decompilation, or disassembly of this software is permitted."
Reading AnandTech's review, they make a bold statement at the end:
"Sandy Bridge, Your Time Is Up."
That is an interesting thought, but is it really?
If you need USB 3, if you want some of the other newer chipset features, perhaps. But for performance?
In benchmarks, Skylake appears to be about 25% faster than Sandy Bridge. Sure, if you're doing video encoding all day or other CPU intensive applications, it is... (and if you ARE doing that stuff, why aren't you on Xeon?)
But for most desktop computer uses, you likely won't see any difference between the two. What is worse, is that most of the above gains came from Haswell, not Skylake.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/...
Look at the "Gains over Sandy Bridge" chart on that page. Look at the red lines, then the purple lines. The red lines are the Haswell gain over Sandy Bridge, then the purple lines are the Skylake gains over Sandy Bridge.
Who says it's only about work?
I was simply point out that the 25% jump in performance over Sandy Bridge is only really going to matter to people who use the computer for that type of work. If it is a hobby, then your time isn't worth money. :)
I do things like this for a hobby
Fair enough... But if you're doing it for a hobby, are you going to spend $800 to upgrade from Sandy Bridge to Skylake for a 25% boost to performance?
As for the link, keep in mind, that's the energy just for a single still image. Multiply for every frame in an animation as necessary, and you can see where the savings pile up.
Sure, except what do those savings translate into? $5 a year, $5 a month, or $5 a day?
I'm all for saving power, it does cost money after all, but how much are we talking about in terms of money?
If you do this as a hobby, then speed may not be that big of a concern anyway, just run jobs overnight. The power bill might add up, which is why I asked what that translated to in dollars over time.
Besides, the 8+ core Xeons tend to sacrifice clockspeed instead, making them less useful for when you need the single-threaded performance for some tasks.
While that is true, they make up for it in spades in performance. A nice dual core Xeon server with a pair of 18 core CPUs for a total of 72 threads running at 2.5 GHz will completely and totally crush anything you could dream of for Skylake. It'll also be rather expensive, at about $15k just for the CPUs, but considering a good employee doing that kind of work costs 5 times that, it is cheap as chips by comparison.
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I suppose my point is that for the vast majority of people, Skylake is not worth upgrading to unless you're still on Core2, and even then for many people those work fine.
You might be one of the exceptions. :)
Intel hasn't had competition from AMD in years and this is the result.
I'm not sure this follows. Intel's primary focus for the last 5-10 years (some would say longer) has been process technology, and I don't think lack of competition from AMD has hurt that at all. You might make the argument that the previous generation's failure of desktop parts to materialize in real quantity, and this generation's tick-tock-THUNK cycle are signs that they're coasting because of lack of competition, but simply saying "my 28nm chip and my 14nm chip are fairly close in performance, damn you monopolistic Intel!" ignores the fact that they really HAVE been pushing hard to keep their edge. It's just that their goals and your goals for the technology are not aligned.
Today, their competitor isn't AMD. It's Global Foundries, TSMC, etc.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Sure, because there's nothing here that could be explained by market trends.
1. Microsoft's monopoly is cracking badly, though perhaps not in the way most of us imagined. If you look at StatCounter's platform stats it's now 55% desktop, 39% mobile, 6% tablets and the desktop has been losing 10%/year the last few years. And people expect apps for their platform, if you're only on Windows or even Mac/Linux too you're now a dinosaur unless it absolutely requires a traditional desktop.
2. The OS is going to become a commodity, they saw what happened with Android once it hit critical mass. Chromebooks are an early warning. Also that XP and Win7 work "too well" so users aren't interested in upgrading, even though it's an expense maybe twice a decade. That MS Office - their stranglehold on the business market - is now on mobile and tablets is clear proof Microsoft knows this.
3. So their old strongholds are breaking down, where do they want to go next? They want to be the middleman between the app developers and the consumers, like Apple's App Store pioneered and Google Play mimic. To do that you need Win10 everywhere. You must get the snowball rolling that to make money you must be on the MS Shop, the same way you could install apps from other sources on Android but the vast majority don't. If you're not on Google Play, you "don't exist".
As for Intel:
1. Mobile, tablets, convertibles, laptops all need wireless connectivity and it's basically just expected features today like network and sound is on desktops, they used to be add-in cards once but was integrated long ago. And fewer and fewer want the hassle of running cables as WiFi speeds go to hundreds of megabits. It's also a simple way for Intel to steal market share by vertical integration, squeezing out third party chips.
2. And here's the kicker people don't seem to understand, Intel doesn't really make desktop chips anymore. Their mainstream chips are laptop spin-offs which get a higher TDP and a few other modifications, the same way their high end chips are Xeon spin-offs. That is also why they sell grossly overpriced desktop chips with better IGP, even though you can do much cheaper with a dGPU. They're just laptop spin-offs that happen to sell well enough to make a desktop version of.
3. So what's the combined effect? Well, you get the laptop features for "free", whether you want them or not. Same way Intel puts an IGP in every chip killing off much of the second hand GPU market, before you had machines that needed any old graphics card and now you don't. Less resale/reuse value means gaming cards in net cost more. It's an indirect way of using their dominance in the CPU business to expand without running into antitrust problems, at least so far.
Or maybe I'm just a NSA disinformation agent out to discredit the revealing of our secret master plan. But you have to admit the cover story is pretty credible, yes?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
So its being a "fanboy" to not support corruption?
No, the fanboy part is where you keep comparing the i7 to the AMD chip, when the i5 is a better comparison...
For games and most users, the i7 offers nothing useful, the i5 is just as fast.
And the i5 is the same price, give or take $10, over the AMD chip.