Friday, August 14th 2015
Intel Core "Skylake" Processors Start Selling
Retail availability of the two Core "Skylake" SKUs Intel debuted, the Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K, begins today. This is when you will be able to pick up a boxed chip off the shelf, or order one online. To help ease the socket confusion, online retailers are selling bundles of these chips with compatible socket LGA1151 motherboards at a nominal discount, some of which include DDR4 memory, depending on the motherboard bundled. On its own, the Core i7-6700K is priced at US $343, while the Core i5-6600K is priced at $250.
The i7-6700K offers clock speeds of 4.00 GHz out of the box, with Turbo Boost frequency of 4.20 GHz. It also offers 8 MB of L3 cache, and HyperThreading, which enables 8 logical CPUs for the OS to address. The Core i5-6600K, on the other hand, offers 3.50 GHz clocks with 3.90 GHz Turbo Boost. It offers 6 MB of L3 cache, and lacks HyperThreading. Both are quad-core chips, with unlocked base-clock multipliers, for overclocking. The retail packages of both chips lack stock cooling solutions, so you need to have an LGA115x-compatible cooler ready. The TDP of both chips is rated at 91W. Intel will put out some of the finer micro-architecture details on the 16th of August, 2015. More Core i5 quad-core SKUs in the series will be released on the 29th of August, 2015. Dual-core Core i3 SKUs will be launched towards the end of September, 2015.
The i7-6700K offers clock speeds of 4.00 GHz out of the box, with Turbo Boost frequency of 4.20 GHz. It also offers 8 MB of L3 cache, and HyperThreading, which enables 8 logical CPUs for the OS to address. The Core i5-6600K, on the other hand, offers 3.50 GHz clocks with 3.90 GHz Turbo Boost. It offers 6 MB of L3 cache, and lacks HyperThreading. Both are quad-core chips, with unlocked base-clock multipliers, for overclocking. The retail packages of both chips lack stock cooling solutions, so you need to have an LGA115x-compatible cooler ready. The TDP of both chips is rated at 91W. Intel will put out some of the finer micro-architecture details on the 16th of August, 2015. More Core i5 quad-core SKUs in the series will be released on the 29th of August, 2015. Dual-core Core i3 SKUs will be launched towards the end of September, 2015.
92 Comments on Intel Core "Skylake" Processors Start Selling
The current "Intel / AMD" core performance ratio is 2:1. Intel processors offers 4 physical cores and some models "multiply" those cores to reach 8 (hyperthreading), that's enough to keep at AMD level.
If Intel make 8 physical cores with the right price then AMD would be out of business. LOL!
Just my opinion.
www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813132572&cm_re=asus_z170_ddr3-_-13-132-572-_-Product
can't understand people complaining about intels 4ad cores, they also have more cores …. Intel extreme processors and Intel xeons have more cores, but those processors are mostly work and heavy tasking oriented, don’t know why you people are mad about that,
It has also been discussed several times, comparison and charts about benchs, tests and reviews, intels extreme exa core processors against moral 4ad cores…. so come up with a good point for the point,
and almost forgot, I really mad because of one thing, intel is putting so much effort on graphics when 95% of the intel i7 processor s use dedicated graphics… so intel WTF are you waiting for making a non integrated graphics i7?
Regards,
Or you could just stop whining in general. That works too.
This seems like a fun discussion.
1) I want moar corez!
2) Why.
1) Because we had 4 core processors nearly a decade ago, where's the progress?
2) What do you need more cores for?
1) ....Gaming?....
2) Name one game using more than 4 cores.
1) *Utter silence*
1) Transcoding and encoding maybe.
2) Ever hear of Haswell-e? The 5820 has 6 cores, quad channel memory, and it cost about the same as the high-end mainstream offering. It's only drawback is the hobbling of PCI-e lanes (when compared to its more expensive companions).
1) *More silence*
1) Screw you.
And the debate ends with nothing gained.
Seriously though, Skylake is another inching forward of processors. The CPU performance increase is...minimal. The amount of PCI-e lanes isn't exactly going up. There's no new connectivity (SATA III, M2, and PCI-e 3.0 are from last generation). The only reason to upgrade is integrated graphics improvement and minor power management improvement. If you're spending $300 on a CPU it's ludicrous to think the iGPU is going to be used often. The increase in power efficiency is probably going to save you pennies a year, so that's out the window.
I'll state what I said previously again. Skylake is shaping up to be more famous for a new RAM standard than anything it actually brought to the table. Even then, Haswell-e stole that thunder over 6 months ago. Call me unimpressed.
Edit:They already do. It's the "enthusiast" platform.
If you were to propose something new, I'd suggest the following.
i3 - Dual core processors with half being 2 thread and half being 4 thread. No frequency modification.
i4 - Quad core processors with integrated graphics and locked frequency.
i5 - Quad core processors without integrated graphics or threading but unlocked frequency.
i6 - Quad core processors with integrated graphics, but no threading.
i7 - Fully unlocked chips with threading and frequency unlocked.
Right now the numbering scheme tells you next to nothing, except how bad it's going to screw your wallet. i5 is reasonable, i7 is overpriced, and most i3 is garbage (except that sweet little unlocked anniversary edition Pentium). None of this even touches on a 'K" or "X" costing a hefty pricing premium.
@Dennis77 I like how the only "thanks" you got was from an AMD fanboy. :laugh:
Is it because someone at Intel decided that it works well for them and locked the progress of the whole industry for the sake of their profits?
Seriously, there is no technical explanation or justification about why they chose exactly that number and not 8 or 12, or 16, or whatever other.Don't be so sure.
Gaming is functionally a slave to the console market. Up until the latest generation the processors had at most one core (except the Cell processor, but that was a ball of fail from the programming side). If you were running something on a PC you got, at most, a couple of threads to function well. Anything more than that, and you have cores doing nothing. This is because developers didn't write games to be threaded, because it would be a waste of money for the console market.
If you can only really make use of 1-2 cores, why include more. In the case of quad cores, it was to multi-task. 2 cores running games, and 2 dedicated to everything else. It was insane to propose more cores, because they'd be sitting idle. If you have idle cores, you're wasting energy. Inefficient chips don't sell, so your product line tanks. I thought this would be evident, given the whole "6 core" AMD processor fiasco.
Even today, there are only a hand full of games that can utilize 4 cores effectively. We're locked into a vicious loop, that's impossible to break. Developers don't spend the resources on writing highly threaded code, so more CPU cores aren't used. Because more cores aren't used, CPU manufacturers stick to 4 cores. Because the next generation of chips is still 4 cores, the developers don't spend money writing highly threaded code.
I'm sure your next point is Photoshop and transcoding/encoding. The people that do this require speed, so they are willing to pay for it. The CPU developers bend them over, and empty their wallets, because anyone using these programs is a professional. Professionals can justify insane costing, because they make money from the activity. The mainstream offerings are not meant for performance, they're meant to be more cost effective and powerful enough for most tasks. Any highly threaded code isn't something where "fast enough" cuts it.
TL;DR:
The reason 4 cores is "standard" is that is all most people use effectively. Whenever threaded code is more prevalent, we'll see more cores on mainstream offerings. Until then, the enthusiast level hardware is more than willing to provide you extra cores for a hefty price premium.
I would ask you about what we are doing now because obviously current generation PS4 has more than 4 cores.
Soon, it will be 2 two whole years since we have 8 eight-core-consoles.
Are we sticking even longer to 4 cores and why?
The processor used in the PS4 and Xbone are Jaguar based "octo-core" chips. Demonstrably, the sharing of certain resources on the CPU makes their performance significantly less fantastic than what we think of as a true octo-core chip.
Of those eight processors, you've got one to two dedicated to running the underlying OS. You've got one dedicated to audio. You're likely to have one processing I/O from the controllers and peripherals. The remaining processors could, theoretically, be used on gaming. That's potentially 4 cores to work with, assuming that we actually started with an octo-core chip. What we've actually got is more akin to 2 or 3 processor cores.
You can argue that this means most completely new games should now run threaded applications, up to 3 cores, much better now. Of course, that means a 4 core processor would still have more utilizable cores than games, which kinda puts a kibosh on thinking all games should be programmed for great threading.
If I were to be generous, I'd conjecture that in the next few years threading will see genuine improvement. More recent incarnations of DX, and Open CL/GL will make threading something enabled by default. Of course, these developments are recent. If they were to influence the market it wouldn't be for several years. Intel and AMD spend years on developing chips, so even if they started with the goal of having mainstream CPUs being 6 cores today it's be well into 2017 before the change hit the market. Moaning that 4 core processors are the standard today would require you go back in time 3 years to change it. As a refresher, that's when DX 11.1 was introduced. 3D was all the rage. Multi-threaded consoles were the pipe-dream of the insane (the Cell failed on coding because Sony couldn't even reliably harness the black magic the processor needed to run better than a three legged dog).
That entire explanation should put your argument to bed, but if it doesn't consider this. If you wanted more cores you could go out and buy a Piledriver processor from AMD. If you want to moan about Intel not offering more cores, stop buying their products. Moaning about not having more useless cores, while ignoring the efforts AMD made to offer exactly that (with spectacularly underwhelming performance because of this effort), is just plain foolish.
Edit:
Before this stupid point is made, let me quash it. Just carving a 4 core CPU into a 6 core CPU isn't possible. It's about as stupid as cutting a horse in half, and expecting it to carry more people because there are now 2 horses. You gloss over the loss of essential faculties.
This is why a 4 core Intel CPU runs laps around an 8 core AMD CPU. The resources each core requires aren't shared, so they get their jobs done without having to wait for another core.
I show 36% are going to get it, they just want the price to come down on boards or DDR4. But they will get it. So its not a 'no'. That said, people here tend to have CPUs that will easily do the job. Typically CPUs aren't the bottleneck anyway, so... makes sense that not a lot of people jumping right into it. Surely some of that reason can be because of the 5-10% gains overall (in 'real world apps or apps that translate directly to real world') over Haswell. Also, this is an enthusiast website really, so a lot of people have a newer platform (say SB on up or FX CPU on up) so there isn't a need to.
I wouldn't think that the meager improvements are the primary reason, but one of many that shape it.
I'm personally satisfied with the Intel 4C/8T performance, why go for a 6C/12T platform?
"More slower cores is better for everyone because there's more cores. Why can't you people understand that?!"
:p
I think Intel is doing what the market (not power users, the market,) is demanding and that is lower power consumption and faster GPU performance. Both of which they've been doing a pretty good job on so far. Not to say Iris Pro on the latest CPUs are great but, they're a big step up from where Intel has been in the past. What good are more cores when most people won't use them? We are talking about a mainstream platform after all.