Intel has once more overhauled its processor range showcasing that they are right on the money with their promising new items; for instance: Skylake, Broadwell, Braswell and the new mobility cores.
There have also been some broad gossipy tidbits that Intel would be deferring their Skylake processors to 2016 however, a second guide upgrade exposes the false claims demonstrating that 2015 would be a real overhaul with respect to processor architecture as well as innovation with the synchronous dispatch of a Tick (Broadwell) and Tock (Skylake).
Intel Updates 2015-2016 Roadmap With 5th Generation Broadwell and 6th Generation Skylake CPUs
Intel has already effectively dispatched their first cycle of their chips focused around the Broadwell building design codenamed as “Center M”. A genuine point by point investigation was carried out of the Core M (Broadwell-Y) and it was concluded that Core M is focused around a genuine 14nm hub from Intel and the same hub would be extended to the performance oriented chips touching base in Spring of 2015. Intel’s Core M will be embraced by performance tablets and also the standard notebooks in this quarter and reviews are already officially hitting the web while the execution SKus will be coming in Spring of 2015 and we will see them being featured in the higher end performance notebooks and All-In-One Pcs.
It might be a little surprising to find out that the Broadwell is simply a hub shrink with a normal IPC change around 5% but this is fairly evened out by its force improvements which do wonders to the notebook to mobility side of things. While this platform features TDPs of 15/28W on the BGA chips, the Braswell is based on the 14nm Airmont architecture will be a SOC / BGA chip for J-Series Processors and come in >10W TDPs. We are going to see them on the Celeron and Pentium series SKUs and hence they will serve as direct competitors for AMD’s AM1 series parts considering the power as well as the pricing range which is roughly on the same scale.
We should generally be focusing more on the desktop parts because they serve as the real meat for the CPU architecture and actually portray the real potential. Two desktop parts are going to be launched by Intel in 2015; the Broadwell-K and Skylake-S. Broadwell-K (Unlocked), which will be compatible with the LGA 1150 socketed motherboards featuring the 9-Series chipsets (Z97/H97), is going to come out in the first half of 2015 and has a few similarities to the Devil’s Canyon which were the enthusiast Haswell parts built for overclockers.
Intel 5th Generation Broadwell – Core i7-5000 and Core i5-5000 Series Processors
By now it has been confirmed that the desktop chips are going to have Intel’s 8th generation Iris Pro graphics chips which are able to generate double the execution units of the HD 4600 graphics chip and also come with its own 128 MB of on-package eDRAM codenamed ‘CrystalWell’. Thanks to the super fast LLC that we get to have the Iris Pro graphics chip with 25.6GB/s + 50GB/s eDRAM (bidirectional) which are perfect for the bandwidth requirement.
Intel 6th Generation Skylake – Core i7-6000 and Core i5-6000 Series Processors
The second update is going to arrive in the second half of 2015 and will be known as Skylake-S which again is also based on a 14nm architecture however it is a microarchitecture which has been built from scratch. These processors can be referred to as the mainstream line and are expected to be branded as the 6th Generation Core i5-6000 and Core i7-6000 parts and they will be compatible with the LGA 1151 socketed motherboards based on the 100-Series (Z170/H170) series Sunrise Point chipset. Quite similar to the Haswell Refresh, these are not going to any unlocked SKUs but they are surely going to give users a chance to have an early experience of Intel’s new mainstream platform with DDR4 compatibility which is right now only available on the HEDT X99 chipset platform on the consumer front.
Secondly it would be wise not to expect some major changes from the Z170 chipset which is not going to be a massive update. In fact you should expect something like the Z97 which came as a minor update to Z87 with only a few more features added including more PCI-e lanes, Super Speed USB and up to 10 USB ports compared to 6 standard ones found on the current iteration of motherboards. The flagship performance chipset is going to support the unlocked K-Series Skylake processors and it appears very much likely that these processors are not going to be available before 2015.
