Intel’s aiming to appeal to gamers and early adopters by releasing the unlocked chips first, beginning August 5th, with the rest of the processor family following in Q3 of this year.
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It all harks back to Intel’s traditional tick-tock release schedule where one year – the tick – the chip range is based on essentially the same design as the year before but with a smaller manufacturing process. From the leaked images of the box window, it is now confirmed that Core i7-6700K will be an an 8-threaded CPU (with 4 physical cores, and 4 HT cores), whereas Core i5-6600K features just four physical cores. A new socket – LGA1151, one pin difference from the fifth generation Cores – means that you’ll need a new motherboard to support this new generation, but you don’t necessarily have to buy these two top of the line chips. The report said this feature several Core i7 and Core i5 processors on the LGA platform.
Skylake is the successor to the chipmaker’s Broadwell architecture, and was first put on the radar at Intel’s Developer Forum last year when the firm previewed the chip, touted to deliver significant increases in performance, battery life and power efficiency. Both are designed with easy overclocking in mind, with Intel boasting that its “full range base clock tuning granularity” will help gamers and PC building enthusiasts to hit the overclocking heights. But Intel is taking a different approach with the new chips, code-named “Skylake“, than it did with 5th-gen “Broadwell” processors.
This news points to an event at the conference, either by Intel or a partner, that will heavily feature the chips. If you’re looking to make a video encoding rig or run multiple graphics cards then they’re still the best bet, but for more general objective use with a single graphics card, Skylake is the way to go.
The new Skylake-based Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K squarely target performance enthusiasts, and pack all of the goodness we’ve come to expect from Intel’s unlocked K-SKUs, in addition to some things that are sure to please the overclocking crowd.
PCI Express 3.0 Interface: Supports up to 8 GT/s for fast access to peripheral devices and networking with up to 16 lanes configurable as 1×16, 2×8, or 1×8 and 2×4 depending on the motherboard design. Internationally, the i5 and i7 are priced at US$243 and US$350 respectively. There were a lot of rumors lately about the specs and performance of the new CPUs, so let’s find out now how true they were (or not).
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The i7 packaging has a warmer red/purple/orange hue, while the i5 stays the course with plain old green/blue. In the third quarter, Skylake, which is the chip company’s 6th gen core processor and supports 100-series motherboards.
