Intel Skylake Microarchitecture Detailed

[btarunr]

The "Skylake" CPU microarchitecture is as much important to Intel as "Sandy Bridge" was, a few years ago. It allows Intel to facilitate mainstream adoption of the DDR4 memory standard (with DDR3 backwards compatibility encouraging cheap upgrades), and gives users IPC increases over older architectures. While users of Core "Haswell" processors and reasonably fast DDR3 memory will find "Skylake" a hard-sell, it should look appealing to users of much older chips, such as "Lynnfield," and perhaps even "Sandy Bridge."

The "Skylake" core is bigger than "Haswell," owing to wider pipelines, prefetcher improvements, more execution units, a bigger front-end with a higher-capacity branch predictor, cache optimizations, and an update to the way HyperThreading works. The instruction window is nearly 1.5x the size of Sandy Bridge, with an out-of-order execution window size of 224 (vs. 168 on Sandy Bridge), load/store sizes of 72/56 (vs. 64/36 on Sandy Bridge), 97 scheduler entries (vs. 56 on Sandy Bridge), and an allocation queue size of 64/thread (vs. 28/thread). The platform of "Skylake" is similar to that of its predecessor, with four notable changes - an integrated camera ISP with the chipset, DDR4 memory support, double the chipset bus bandwidth (64 Gb/s), and eDRAM support on certain CPU SKUs.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[buggalugs]

I have a feeling theres going to be more CPUs for this platform, faster than the 6700K. A devils canyon type CPU......

 

[yeeeeman]

Regarding another CPU, better than 6700K, I don't think that there is much more to be squeezed from it. I mean, it's already at 4Ghz, and the process is not in a very good shape. Just look at the difference between 5775C consumption (which is at 3.5Ghz, IIRC) and this. The consumption and leakage probably grows exponentially when going over 4Ghz. Their only chance is to maybe improve the process which I think it will happen given the fact that the next node is at 10nm and it is getting more and more difficult to go smaller at each node. So, I think this generation or the next one the enthusiast line of CPUs from them (like 5960X) will become more and more relevant, because you can squeeze that much power from a single core without going crazy or fully changing the design (which is a big task even for Intel, imagine how it's for AMD). I think quad cores will go into low power zone (I say a leak with i7 6820EQ or smth like that with 2/2.8Ghz on 25W TDP which is very nice). And lets be honest to ourselves, the performance has become so good with the latest gen of cpus that there's no real need of more improvements.

 

[R-T-B]

Come on Skylake-E... I've been looking for an excuse to host another super-sale of my hardware... who wouldn't want a cheap 5820k?

 

[Uplink10]

"Extended overclocking capabilities"
Fu**ing bastards lock the overclocking in the first place!

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I have a feeling theres going to be more CPUs for this platform, faster than the 6700K. A devils canyon type CPU......

Intel already announced Kaby Lake (14nm) which is a "Skylake refresh." Intel isn't expecting Cannonlake (10nm) until at least 2017. Tock-tock-tick as it were.

 

[haswrong]

oh damn, i read: "Intel Skylake Microarchitecture Dead"

i might be a disgraphic..