Intel today officially unveiled the full lineup of its 6th generation Core processors that are built on the company’s Skylake architecture on a 14nm fabrication process.
Thanks to the new architecture and other improvements across the board, Skylake processors from Intel are significantly faster and power efficient than its predecessor. Like before, Intel will be offering its 6th generation Core processors in four different lineups: Y-series, U-series, H-series, and Xeon.
The Y-series of processors, previously known as Core M, offer up to 40 percent improvement in graphics performance and will now be available in Core m3, Core m5, and Core m7 variants. Intel is also claiming that under normal use, these processors will allow most ultrabooks to offer up to ten hours of battery life. Apple already uses a Core M processor inside the 12″ MacBook and it is a given that when the laptop is refreshed next year, it will make use of these new Y-series processors from Intel.
Apart from the performance improvements, another thing to note about the Skylake Core M processors, is that their package is drastically smaller than the Broadwell processors. This will allow OEMs to further reduce the motherboard inside their tablets and ultrabooks thereby allowing for more room for battery.
Next in line is Intel’s 6th generation U-series chips that offer up to 34 percent increase in graphics performance and up to 40 percent improvement in battery life. Compared to previous generation U-series chips, the 6th generation chips have seen an increase in their base clock speed, which in addition to the new microarchitecture leads to a 10x performance improvement compared to Broadwell chips from Intel. The 15 and 28W U series chips will not be available to OEMs until early next year, so don’t expect Apple to refresh its MacBook Air and MacBook Pro lineup anytime before that.
Almost all the U series of processor from Intel now come with a dedicated eDRAM, which will help in greatly improving the graphics performance. Since this eDRAM can also be used an an L4 cache, it can also be used by the CPU to further boost performance when needed.
The H-series of processors are aimed towards heavy duty performing laptops, and has been used by Apple inside the 15-inch MacBook Pro in the past. Intel did not announce any H-series Skylake processor with its Iris Pro GPU, so it is unlikely that Apple will use them on its MacBook Pro. Additionally, these parts won’t start shipping to OEM until next year, at which point it is possible that Intel will release more variants of the CPU to cater to Apple’s demand.
Apart from faster graphics performance and increased power efficiency, Skylake chips from Intel will also be capable of simultaneously running up to 3 monitors with 4K resolution. They also support more I/O ports like USB 3.1 through Thunderbolt, RAID, up to 4 SATA 6Gbps ports, and more.
[Via Intel]
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