Overall, despite not living up to lofty expectations, Skylake is an improvement over Haswell in every way. In some cases it’s only a small difference, in other cases it’s more noticeable.

There’s no doubt that in terms of single and multithreaded and performance, Intel’s Core i7-6700K is the best quad-core chip on the market. In a high-end consumer PC, particularly for gaming, there’s nothing better. If you’re shopping for a new desktop PC, get one with a Skylake chip.

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Overall, Skylake is not an earth shattering leap in performance. In our IPC testing, with CPUs at 3 GHz, we saw a 5.7% increase in performance over a Haswell processor at the same clockspeed and ~ 25% gains over Sandy Bridge. That 5.7% value masks the fact that between Haswell and Skylake, we have Broadwell, marking a 5.7% increase for a two generation gap.

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What should we make of these results? If you've been nursing along a system based on a Sandy Bridge processor like the Core i5-2500K or Core i7-2600K, then perhaps Skylake has enough to offer to prompt an upgrade. Cumulatively, Intel has made quite a bit of progress in the past several years—and the Skylake platform with the Z170 chipset is a considerable upgrade in terms of I/O bandwidth, too. Those motherboards bristle with storage options and high-speed USB ports and such. So there's that. What's jarring about our gaming results is that the Sandy Bridge-based 2600K remains a very competent processor for running the current PC games we tested. You'll probably want to avoid thinking about that fact when it comes time to pull out the credit card.

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There’s no easy way to write this.

Discrete graphics card performance decreases on Skylake over Haswell.

This doesn’t particularly make much sense at first glance. Here we have a processor with a higher IPC than Haswell but it performs worse in both DDR3 and DDR4 modes. The amount by which it performs worse is actually relatively minor, usually -3% with the odd benchmark (GRID on R7 240) going as low as -5%. Why does this happen at all?

So we passed our results on to Intel, as well as a few respected colleagues in the industry, all of whom were quite surprised. During a benchmark, the CPU performs tasks and directs memory transfers through the PCIe bus and vice versa. Technically, the CPU tasks should complete quicker due to the IPC and the improved threading topology, so that only leaves the PCIe to DRAM via CPU transfers.

Our best guess, until we get to IDF to analyze what has been changed or a direct explanation from Intel, is that part of the FIFO buffer arrangement between the CPU and PCIe might have changed with a hint of additional latency. That being said, a minor increase in PCIe overhead (or a decrease in latency/bandwidth) should be masked by the workload, so there might be something more fundamental at play, such as bus requests being accidentally duplicated or resent due to signal breakdown. There might also be a tertiary answer of an internal bus not running at full speed. To be sure, we rested some benchmarks on a different i7-6700K and a different motherboard, but saw the same effect. We’ll see how this plays out on the full-speed tests.

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Fachasaurus said:

So keep my 2600K at 4.6ghz. Okay Intel. Thank you!

Also, hopefully Zen will catch up to these numbers and be in the competition again!

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That 5.7% value masks the fact that between Haswell and Skylake, we have Broadwell, marking a 5.7% increase for a two generation gap.

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Arrage said:

Four years for 25% improvement. I am very disappointed in the progress of desktop processors.

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Arrage said:

Four years for 25% improvement. I am very disappointed in the progress of desktop processors.

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Fachasaurus said:

Also, hopefully Zen will catch up to these numbers and be in the competition again!

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Arrage said:

Four years for 25% improvement. I am very disappointed in the progress of desktop processors.

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Fachasaurus said:

So keep my 2600K at 4.6ghz. Okay Intel. Thank you!

Also, hopefully Zen will catch up to these numbers and be in the competition again!

EDIT: I think I will upgrade when I actually need the rendering power for work related stuff. But seriously, the 2600K has been a lot more future proof than I ever imagined for gaming. Good job past Fach, high five!

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Fairfax said:

Lack of competition does that.

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Tenebrous said:

Not too exciting, to be honest. My 3770k shall soldier on.

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Man said:

Building a new PC in September so perfect timing. 980Ti, DDR4, Win 10, Skylake.

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wildfire said:

Zen physically can't. AMD promises 40% IPC improvement over Piledriver.

That still puts them behind Haswell by 15% at best. AMD have yet to deliver on their promises since the bulldozer disaster.

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LordOfChaos said:

See, I really don't think it's that. Mobile has come a long way in the last few years, I think Intel is just focused there right now. It's not like they're not investing in architectures anymore because of no competition, they're just not investing where some of us would like them to.

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There’s no easy way to write this.

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Gaming? Oh dear...From AT:
There’s no easy way to write this.

Discrete graphics card performance decreases on Skylake over Haswell.

This doesn’t particularly make much sense at first glance. Here we have a processor with a higher IPC than Haswell but it performs worse in both DDR3 and DDR4 modes. The amount by which it performs worse is actually relatively minor, usually -3% with the odd benchmark (GRID on R7 240) going as low as -5%. Why does this happen at all?

So we passed our results on to Intel, as well as a few respected colleagues in the industry, all of whom were quite surprised. During a benchmark, the CPU performs tasks and directs memory transfers through the PCIe bus and vice versa. Technically, the CPU tasks should complete quicker due to the IPC and the improved threading topology, so that only leaves the PCIe to DRAM via CPU transfers.

Our best guess, until we get to IDF to analyze what has been changed or a direct explanation from Intel, is that part of the FIFO buffer arrangement between the CPU and PCIe might have changed with a hint of additional latency. That being said, a minor increase in PCIe overhead (or a decrease in latency/bandwidth) should be masked by the workload, so there might be something more fundamental at play, such as bus requests being accidentally duplicated or resent due to signal breakdown. There might also be a tertiary answer of an internal bus not running at full speed. To be sure, we rested some benchmarks on a different i7-6700K and a different motherboard, but saw the same effect. We’ll see how this plays out on the full-speed tests.

Click to expand...

jim2point0 said:

Kinda bummed. Was hoping for something to upgrade to from my 3770k.

Is there even a point to upgrading to something like a 5930k?. Other than benchmarks, I'm not sure how much of an improvement there wold be. Probably the same in games?

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oatmeal said:

Hoping the iMac refresh has this so I can upgrade this year.

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Quenk said:

Buying a non-k i-2500 was a mistake. Maybe now will be a good time to upgrade.

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crazepharmacist said:

i7920@4hz- most valuable and long lasting PC component I've ever purchased. Hanging onto it until Cannonlake, probably.

Click to expand...

There’s no easy way to write this.

Discrete graphics card performance decreases on Skylake over Haswell.

This doesn’t particularly make much sense at first glance. Here we have a processor with a higher IPC than Haswell but it performs worse in both DDR3 and DDR4 modes. The amount by which it performs worse is actually relatively minor, usually -3% with the odd benchmark (GRID on R7 240) going as low as -5%. Why does this happen at all?

So we passed our results on to Intel, as well as a few respected colleagues in the industry, all of whom were quite surprised. During a benchmark, the CPU performs tasks and directs memory transfers through the PCIe bus and vice versa. Technically, the CPU tasks should complete quicker due to the IPC and the improved threading topology, so that only leaves the PCIe to DRAM via CPU transfers.

Our best guess, until we get to IDF to analyze what has been changed or a direct explanation from Intel, is that part of the FIFO buffer arrangement between the CPU and PCIe might have changed with a hint of additional latency. That being said, a minor increase in PCIe overhead (or a decrease in latency/bandwidth) should be masked by the workload, so there might be something more fundamental at play, such as bus requests being accidentally duplicated or resent due to signal breakdown. There might also be a tertiary answer of an internal bus not running at full speed. To be sure, we rested some benchmarks on a different i7-6700K and a different motherboard, but saw the same effect. We’ll see how this plays out on the full-speed tests.

Click to expand...