Intel announced its sixth generation Intel Core I7-6700k processor, codenamed Skylake. The company's new processor is unlocked for overclocking, which will please the advanced users and fans of gaming, who will be able to set their system specs up to their needs. The CPU will run at a base frequency of 4GHz and with a Turbo CPU frequency will be 4.2GHz.
The 6th generation Intel processor is good news for consumers, as it will provide reduced power consumption, along with greater CPU and GPU performance. According to Intel, the Skylake CPU will be released toward the end of the year. The new Skylake processor from Intel will come with a price tag of around $350.
Since all major PC vendors have already agreed to use the Rezence wireless charging in laptops, one notable feature of Skylake is its support for this new industry standard. Reducing power consumption will be one of the top priorities of Intel for Skylake. The most significant new power saving feature introduced in Skylake is called Speed Shift Technology. The new processor will be used in various systems, from 95W desktop devices to 4.5W ultralight systems and tablets. The chip will feature extra thermal headroom as an underlying principle of Turbo Boost.
Some of the Skylake chipsets will feature image signal processors (ISPs) similar to those currently found now in smartphone processors. These ISPs will include hardware support for a range of image processing tasks such as face detection, video capture, panorama capture, burst capture, and HDR capture. They will also include support for up to four 13MP cameras from which two can be simultaneously active.
The Skylake processor will be able to dispatch more instructions at once and will perform better at extracting parallelism. In certain circumstances, the processor will be able to fetch and dispatch up to six instructions at once, with up to 224 instructions at once in its out-of-order buffer. Optimization to reduce prefetching when the processor detects that the feature is not helpful will make a prefetching function in Skylake smarter. Some instructions have been optimized to work faster and the AES acceleration instructions have increased encryption performance by up to 17 percent in GCM mode and by up to 33 percent in CBC mode.
The new processor's architecture uses a faster ring buffer to connect all the cores to the memory controller, GPU and I/O blocks. According to Intel, its throughput has doubled, allowing higher performance while maintaining the same power cost. Depending on what the current situation requires, Skylake can offer alternatively the same level of throughput at a reduced power cost, An increased memory bandwidth was achieved due its support for DDR4.
