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Intel Sky Lake CPUs due in August
http://techreport.com/news/28450/skylake-boards-from-biostar-are-coming-in-august
Well, the article doesn't explicitly say that. But if motherboards for the CPUs are coming in August, it's awfully likely that the CPUs will be available by then, too. And Biostar let slip that their motherboards for Sky Lake CPUs are coming in August. Sky Lake takes a new socket to accommodate the dual channel DDR4 memory, so it's not like you could just use an older CPU in the new motherboards, as has happened occasionally with AMD's CPU updates where the new motherboards made it to market before the new CPUs.
Will Sky Lake be a huge advance in desktop CPUs? Probably not. But it's got a good shot at being better than Haswell--which is a bar that Broadwell failed to clear. And a little better than what was previously on the market sure beats being a little worse.
Comments
I'm not expecting Sky Lake to be some revolutionary chip. But as time passes, you want progressively better performance and better efficiency. Sky Lake will be on 14 nm, as compared to 22 nm for Haswell, so it should have considerably better energy efficiency--as Broadwell does.
In the markets where this matters, this also allows for more CPU cores. I don't know how many cores the top Sky Lake-based Xeon E5 or E7 chip will have, but I'm betting it's more than the 18 in Haswell-based Xeon chips.
Sky Lake will also be the first laptop chip to use DDR4 memory. That means reduced power consumption for memory, as well as more bandwidth without having to do outlandish, expensive things like Crystalwell.