intel'S sixtH generatioN chipS "skylakE" tO launcH iN augusT

Intel's sixth-generation Skylake processors won't be ready in time for Computex 2015 in June and will debut at some point in August with a showcase at the Intel Developer Forum being tipped as the date for the diary. 

A recently leaked product roadmap shows that the Skylake-U mobile chip and Skylake-S desktop version are both looking at a Q3 2015 unveiling with Broadwell chips picking up the slack in the meantime. 

VR-Zone also confirmed some of the TDP ratings of the range of desktop Skylake-S chips that is topped by the quad-core K CPU, which has a 95W maximum and is joined by the more energy efficient 65W and 35W variants. 

Better battery life:

Reports midway through last year already mentioned the top-end 95W TDP rating when a leak stated there will be four versions of Skylake with some possessing eDRAM (up to 128MB), support for DDR4 and TDP from 4W up to 95W. 

Skylake chips are expected to bring increases in battery life and power efficiency for laptops as well as cord cutting features such as support for wireless charging and the ability to send data and display signals over WiGig.

Architecture:

• 14 nm manufacturing process
• LGA 1151 socket
• Z170/H170 chipset (Sunrise Point)
• Thermal design power (TDP) up to 95 W (LGA 1151)
• Support for both DDR3 SDRAM and DDR4 SDRAM in mainstream variants, using custom UniDIMM SO-DIMM form factor with up to 64 GB of RAM on LGA 1151 variants.
• Support for 20 PCI Express 3.0 lanes (LGA 1151)
• Support for PCI Express 4.0 (Skylake-E/EP/EX)
• Support for Thunderbolt 3.0 (Alpine Ridge)
• 64 to 128 MB L4 eDRAM cache on certain SKUs
• Up to four cores as the default mainstream configuration
• Support for SATA Express
• AVX-512 F, CDI, VL, BW, and DQ
• Intel SHA Extensions: SHA-1 and SHA-256 (Secure Hash Algorithms)
• Intel MPX (Memory Protection Extensions)
• Intel ADX (Multi-Precision Add-Carry Instruction Extensions)
• Skylake's integrated GPU supports Direct3D 12 at feature level 12.0