Friday, July 24th 2015
Skylake iGPU Gets Performance Leap, Incremental Upgrade for CPU Performance
With its 6th generation Core "Skylake" processors, Intel is throwing in everything it's got, into increasing performance of the integrated graphics. This is necessitated not by some newfound urge to compete with entry-discrete GPUs from NVIDIA or AMD, but a rather sudden increase in display resolutions, after nearly a decade of stagnation. Notebook and tablet designers are wanting to cram in higher resolution displays, such as WQHD (2560 x 1440), 4K (3840 x 2160), and beyond, and are finding it impossible to achieve them without discrete graphics. This is what Intel is likely after. The aftereffect of this effort would be that the iGPU will be finally capable of playing some games at 720p or 900p resolutions, with moderate eye-candy. Games such as League of Legends should be fairly playable, even at 1080p. Intel claims that its 9th generation integrated graphics will over a 50% performance increment over the previous generation.
Moving on to CPU, and the performance-increase is a predictable 10-20% single/multi-thread CPU performance, over "Broadwell." This is roughly similar to how "Haswell" bettered "Ivy Bridge," and how "Sandy Bridge" bettered "Lynnfield." Intel will provide platform support on some of its "Skylake-U" ultraportable variants, for much of the modern I/O used by today's tablets and notebooks, which required third-party controllers, and which competing semi-custom SoCs natively offer, such as eMMC 5.0, SDIO 3.0, SATA 6 Gb/s, PCIe gen 3.0, and USB 3.0. Communications are also improved, with 2x 802.11 ac, Bluetooth 4.1, and WiDi 6.0.
Source:
FanlessTech
Moving on to CPU, and the performance-increase is a predictable 10-20% single/multi-thread CPU performance, over "Broadwell." This is roughly similar to how "Haswell" bettered "Ivy Bridge," and how "Sandy Bridge" bettered "Lynnfield." Intel will provide platform support on some of its "Skylake-U" ultraportable variants, for much of the modern I/O used by today's tablets and notebooks, which required third-party controllers, and which competing semi-custom SoCs natively offer, such as eMMC 5.0, SDIO 3.0, SATA 6 Gb/s, PCIe gen 3.0, and USB 3.0. Communications are also improved, with 2x 802.11 ac, Bluetooth 4.1, and WiDi 6.0.
100 Comments on Skylake iGPU Gets Performance Leap, Incremental Upgrade for CPU Performance
"With its 6th generation Core "Skylake" processors, Intel is throwing in everything it's got!......... into increasing performance of the integrated graphics.........."
From what I've checked, everything is identical. Cache sizes, core count, thread count etc. Hell, I even have triple channel on my ancient grunt and Skylake is only dual channel. Like ugh!? Totally pointless product. It only makes sense if you don't have a computer and you're buiying from scratch. Or you have some shitty dual core from 10 years ago...
I see in the first image there is something built into the chip called McAfee YAP... wth is this? McAfee is a terrible company and software... looks like I am hanging on to my SB until 10nm is actually on shelves...
Of course I might still buy that discrete GPU unless Intel starts improving their drivers..
Anyway what you dream is what Nvidia fears, that's why they keep presenting, more and more hi end cards, instead of mid range. What you dream is what we will have in 1-2 years from now with 16nm and HBM. :)
Today we have DirectX 11 and the iGPU is not used when gaming with a discrete GPU(dual graphics is not important). So, with DirectX11 Intel CPUs win easily against AMD APUs. The iGPU performance doesn't count here.
Tomorrow we will be playing DirectX 12 games. AMD will hopefully have a better architecture with Zen, but even without that, AMD offers more cores at the same prices. With the multithreaded performance that DirectX 12 offers, the difference between using an 4 core APU and a 2 core + HT i3 will be much smaller if any. With asynchronous multi GPU, the iGPU part of the APU will offer much higher help to the discrete GPU, probably making the APU + discrete GPU combination, performing much better than the i3 + discrete GPU combination.
Also, at this pace, in 2017 Intel's iGPU will be 200% faster than AMD's, not only a few dozen percent. I'm not upgrading from my Phenom II and HD 7850 until 2016-2017 anyway.
My friend with old Athlon X2 (AMD 690 chipset?) can't play Dota 2 for example. Many Dota, LoL, CS (basically anything very popular) playerbase is still running basic PC/Notebook. Even if it's not for gaming, browser and Windows itself is accelerated using GPU. Good (i)GPU is a basic necessity now.
"they should focus the R&D on something else ... or buy nvidia ... i don't get the intel IGP improvement madness ... oh yes ... future is NUC (or so they would like it to be) we all gonna have a tiny box with a intel CPU and IGP, so it's better they improve their IGP for when they will take over the world :D (i am totally not serious there ... )"
(ofc in the Laptop domain it's different ... tho, is a i7 2core +HT a top end CPU ... well in laptop it is ... :laugh: currently my i5-5200U + HD Graphics 5500 is enough ... no gaming notebook tho :roll: and surely way more affordable than a future Skl Laptop)
TL;DR Start rooting for AMD if you want product improvements from Intel that aren't "pointless."