At the heart of the Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K quad-core processors, which made their debut at Gamescom earlier this month, is Intel's swanky new "Skylake-D" silicon, built on its new 14 nanometer silicon fab process. Intel released technical documents that give us a peek into the die layout of this chip. To begin with, the Skylake silicon is tiny, compared to its 22 nm predecessor, the Haswell-D (i7-4770K, i5-4670K, etc).
What also sets this chip apart from its predecessors, going all the way back to "Lynnfield" (and perhaps even "Nehalem,") is that it's a "square" die. The CPU component, made up of four cores based on the "Skylake" micro-architecture, is split into rows of two cores each, sitting across the chip's L3 cache. This is a departure from older layouts, in which a single file of four cores lined one side of the L3 cache. The integrated GPU, Intel's Gen9 iGPU core, takes up nearly as much die area as the CPU component. The uncore component (system agent, IMC, I/O, etc.) takes up the rest of the die. The integrated Gen9 iGPU features 24 execution units (EUs), spread across three EU-subslices of 8 EUs, each. This GPU supports DirectX 12 (feature level 12_1). We'll get you finer micro-architecture details very soon.
