LordOfChaos
Member
Didn't see this up yet after a search, but I feel like I'm wrong anyways, yada yada something if old
Ars-
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/intel-skylake-core-i7-6700k-reviewed/
Anandtech-
http://anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation
Tech report-
http://techreport.com/review/28751/intel-core-i7-6700k-skylake-processor-reviewed
Gaming? Oh dear...From AT:
Ars-
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/08/intel-skylake-core-i7-6700k-reviewed/
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.
Anandtech-
http://anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation
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.
Tech report-
http://techreport.com/review/28751/intel-core-i7-6700k-skylake-processor-reviewed
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.
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.