Intel's Skylake architecture, which christened the 6000 series of CPUs, has had its time in the sun, there's no denying that. However, as has been the case with Intel, who usually don't keep more than two architectures in the market at any given time, the Skylake series of processors have seen the end of their days. This is the announced death of an architecture that was competent in offering a token improvement for Intel's Core performance. Yet despite that, it certainly didn't set the world on fire with anticipation and acclaim. It was a sound business decision for Intel, however, allowing the company to maximize profits and capitalizing on a virtually outclassed competitor, which offered, at the time, the ill-spoken Bulldozer architecture and derivatives.

This comes mere months before Intel ships out their 8000 series CPUs on the Coffee Lake microarchitecture. This one is the most interesting from the blue giant in years, seeing a core count democratization towards the masses and the virtual elimination of dual-core CPUs, which have been overstaying their welcome for some time now. Expect decreasing availability in the following moths as retailers work through their available inventories. According to Intel, Skylake processors can be ordered until March 2018, with deliveries finalizing by September 2018. This applies particularly to the (arguably) most interesting models in the lineup, in the form of the Core i7-6700K, Core i5-6600K, and the Core i5-6402P and Core i3-6098P models which shipped with less powerful HD510 iGPUs. I say arguably, because for this editor, an i5-6400 which was overclockable through BIOS settings was the price-performance champion of this generation.