Intel Skylake ES Chips

[Adam Howarth]

Gday

 

So Ive got my hands on apart from other skylake chips, an engineering sample of the Core i7-6700K

 

As I posted about previously, Intel's Broadwell generation micro architecture is pretty much a non event for desktop socketed CPU buyers

 

Skylake is where its at, and on the consumer desktop side outside of the extreme edition chips which sadly will be released much later on, the chip most will want is the Core i7-6700K. Four physical cores, eight logical cores. Its testing out to be about 15% faster than the prior generation clock for clock, which is allot more than the typical 5% we found with sandy bridge era chips.

 

I still havent made my mind up if in P3D with all the usual add ons, its better to run with server grade or extreme edition chips that have more cores and be behind the latest in microarchitecture generations, or just go for 8 logical core CPUs on the latest generation. To answer that definitively requires time in performance testing I dont have right now.

 

The motherboards for these chips take a different socket and chipset so the BIOS is very buggy at the moment, but theres time before release to get it right. I think those who like having 8 logical cores will be happy with the performance increases offered in the Core i7-6700K, but its a pretty hot chip where the TDP isnt much smaller despite the insane small lithographic fabrication being used.