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Sky Lake launches. Sort of.

QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,347

Has there ever been a quieter launch of a new, top of the line gaming CPU?

The short version is, it's better than Haswell, though not by very much.  That is, at least, an improvement over Broadwell, which was worse than Haswell.  Clock speeds on the Core i5-6600K are the same as for the Core i5-4690K, while the base clock speed on the Core i7-6700K is the same as the Core i7-4790K.  Max turbo on the 6700K is down to 4.2 GHz, from 4.4 GHz on the 4790K.  Sky Lake does tend to be several percent faster at the same clock speed than Haswell.  Rumors have it that with overclocking, Sky Lake can clock a little higher than Haswell.

But while reviews came out on Wednesday, retail availability isn't there yet.  New Egg says the parts are launching next Friday.  So Wednesday was basically a paper launch, and it's not clear how soon there will be heavy volume at retail.  Wednesday only officially launched the overclockable K-series parts, while the rest of the Sky Lake lineup is coming a little later this month or next.  Also notable is that the K-series parts don't come with a stock cooler at all.  Not that using Intel's awful stock coolers was ever a sensible thing to do if you wanted to overclock.

Interestingly, Sky Lake's official TDP goes up from Haswell and even Devil's Canyon, in spite of the shrink from 22 nm to 14 nm.  Then again, the claimed 88 W TDP of a Core i7-4790K always was pretty much a lie to begin with.  So Sky Lake's 91 W is probably just a return to honest labeling.

Sky Lake uses a new socket, LGA 1151, and can use either DDR3 or DDR4 memory.  All of the motherboards available so far use DDR4, but DDR3 is presumably coming.  With the price difference between DDR3 and DDR4 shrinking, if you're willing to shell out for Sky Lake, I'd go with DDR4 unless you've got a bunch of DDR3 that you're itching to re-use.

Is Sky Lake a reason to upgrade from an overclocked Sandy Bridge system from 2011?  Unlike some media reviews, I'd say no.  If you've got an AMD system or a pre-Sandy Bridge system, I'd see Sky Lake as pretty strong evidence that there aren't any huge gaming CPU upgrades just over the horizon, so it's fine to upgrade whenever you're ready and feel the need to.  The x86 CPU architecture is very mature and Intel is having a lot of trouble squeezing further per-core improvements out of it.

With Sandy Bridge now out for so long and Intel having trouble improving much ever since, AMD has presumably had plenty of time to figure out how Intel made Sandy Bridge so good and do likewise with Zen next year.  So it's likely that with Zen cores, AMD will have something a lot more competitive with Intel than what AMD has to offer today.  That sort of competition is good for consumers, of course.  And, of course, if Zen is another disaster to follow Bulldozer, then AMD will likely go bankrupt--and will certainly deserve to.

Comments

  • RzepRzep Member UncommonPosts: 767
    Skylake is the biggest MEH in quite a long time. I was waiting for Skylake and it turns out the best thing I can do is simply OC my 2500k. Disapointing all around, especially considering the price is not great and you need a new mobo. The mobo prices are also high.
  • SpottyGekkoSpottyGekko Member EpicPosts: 6,916
    Originally posted by Quizzical

    ....  And, of course, if Zen is another disaster to follow Bulldozer, then AMD will likely go bankrupt--and will certainly deserve to.

    Even though such a demise of AMD could be called "deserved", it will be bad news for PC gaming enthusiasts. It will leave Intel in a de facto monopoly position in that market. With no competition in sight...

  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,347
    Originally posted by SpottyGekko
    Originally posted by Quizzical

    ....  And, of course, if Zen is another disaster to follow Bulldozer, then AMD will likely go bankrupt--and will certainly deserve to.

    Even though such a demise of AMD could be called "deserved", it will be bad news for PC gaming enthusiasts. It will leave Intel in a de facto monopoly position in that market. With no competition in sight...

    Well of course it would be bad news.  It's always good news for consumers when more vendors make better products.

    I don't think an AMD bankruptcy would mean that all AMD products simply vanish; a lot of bankruptcies don't result in liquidation.  Even in the event that AMD ceased to exist, AMD GPUs are a valuable commodity and plenty of companies would like to snap up that part of the company.  I'm not sure what would happen to x86 CPUs, though; while there are other companies that would like an x86 license, Intel would fight against letting someone else buy up the x86 license and the current cross-licensing agreement would have to be renegotiated.

    If Zen cores are good, then AMD will be fine, and "what happens if AMD goes bankrupt" will all be moot.  It's AMD's CPU portion dragging down the company right now.

  • H0urg1assH0urg1ass Member EpicPosts: 2,380

    When I bought my i7-950K I got a pretty shitty bin that wouldn't OC past 4.5 (and only 4.5 if I disabled hyperthreading) while a few of my friends were hitting 5.0's.  I was a sad panda.

    When I was ready to replace those parts, I got an i5-4670K with an ASRock Z97 Extreme 4 mobo.  I was pleasantly surprised when I was able to hit 4.5, which on a Haswell i5 is pretty decent.

    By comparison, I ran a few encoding tests with Handbrake on my 950 before I replaced it with the 4970.  The movie that I was encoding to MP4 would take nearly two hours on the 950 and less than ten minutes on the 4970.  So basically, I'm very happy with my Haswell and from what I've read about this Sky Lake, I'm not impressed in the least.

    Not only that but they're changing the pins again?  So a new processor means new motherboard yet again?  Yeah, no thanks.  I wonder how much the mobo manufacturers are paying Intel in kickbacks to fuck us every couple of years.

  • RidelynnRidelynn Member EpicPosts: 7,383

    I was under the impression the TDP went up mostly because of the much larger integrated graphics, which, at least under initial reviews, seems to compare favorably (if not best) AMD's APU graphics.

  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,347
    Originally posted by Ridelynn

    I was under the impression the TDP went up mostly because of the much larger integrated graphics, which, at least under initial reviews, seems to compare favorably (if not best) AMD's APU graphics.

    The GT2 graphics in the reviewed parts are not remotely competitive on the GPU with AMD's Kaveri, and shouldn't have a higher TDP than Haswell's graphics unless Intel is doing something seriously wrong.  Reviewers mostly don't have the tools to get a clean measurement of the GPU in isolation, though; just firing up a random game won't do it.  Sky Lake will beat Kaveri on integrated graphics in a lot of games--but only if the GPU isn't the bottleneck.  Sky Lake beats Kaveri on CPU performance and memory bandwidth, and one of those is usually the bottleneck for games on Kaveri.

    Broadwell and likely the higher end Sky Lake GPU parts that haven't yet launched will beat Kaveri handily, but almost purely because of the Crystalwell L4 cache that relieves the memory bottleneck.  If Intel doesn't get its act together with its GPU architecture, AMD is going to open up a huge and obvious lead in gaming on integrated graphics as soon as they make a consumer APU with HBM on package.  AMD has announced that an APU with HBM is coming for HPC purposes in 2017; they haven't said anything about a consumer APU with HBM, but it would be staggering ineptitude if that's not also in the works.

  • rojoArcueidrojoArcueid Member EpicPosts: 10,722

    Interesting.

    So i guess the only benefit (at least for me) of waiting for Sky lake to upgrade my i5 750 is that i will soon find a cheaper 4 digit Haswell.





  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,347
    Originally posted by rojoArcueid

    Interesting.

    So i guess the only benefit (at least for me) of waiting for Sky lake to upgrade my i5 750 is that i will soon find a cheaper 4 digit Haswell.

    Nope.  Intel doesn't slash prices on older products.  Intel discontinues older products.

    That's not to say that Haswell is about to be discontinued.  Intel didn't discontinue Ivy Bridge until around the end of 2014--about a year and a half after launching Haswell.

  • RidelynnRidelynn Member EpicPosts: 7,383


    Originally posted by Quizzical
    Well of course it would be bad news.  It's always good news for consumers when more vendors make better products.I don't think an AMD bankruptcy would mean that all AMD products simply vanish; a lot of bankruptcies don't result in liquidation.  Even in the event that AMD ceased to exist, AMD GPUs are a valuable commodity and plenty of companies would like to snap up that part of the company.  I'm not sure what would happen to x86 CPUs, though; while there are other companies that would like an x86 license, Intel would fight against letting someone else buy up the x86 license and the current cross-licensing agreement would have to be renegotiated.

    There's also the x86-64 license, which AMD holds, and Intel actually pays AMD to use.

  • QuizzicalQuizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,347
    Originally posted by Ridelynn

     


    Originally posted by Quizzical
    Well of course it would be bad news.  It's always good news for consumers when more vendors make better products.

     

    I don't think an AMD bankruptcy would mean that all AMD products simply vanish; a lot of bankruptcies don't result in liquidation.  Even in the event that AMD ceased to exist, AMD GPUs are a valuable commodity and plenty of companies would like to snap up that part of the company.  I'm not sure what would happen to x86 CPUs, though; while there are other companies that would like an x86 license, Intel would fight against letting someone else buy up the x86 license and the current cross-licensing agreement would have to be renegotiated.


     

    There's also the x86-64 license, which AMD holds, and Intel actually pays AMD to use.

    Intel and AMD have both patented a whole bunch of x86-related things.  They have a cross-licensing agreement to be able to use each others patents, but that agreement is void if someone else buys AMD.  That doesn't mean it can't happen; it does mean, however, that they'd have to renegotiate the licensing agreement, and it's not clear what would happen in that situation.  Possibly lawsuits.

  • HrimnirHrimnir Member RarePosts: 2,415

    Honestly i'm not really unimpressed with skylake.  I'm really not sure what people were expecting.  Anyone who knows what they're talking about knew this was likely going to be in the range of a 5-10% improvement.  Its not a new nm process.  And like Quiziccal said, x86 is VERY mature at this point, and on top of that we're bumping into issue with processors due to physics.

    That being said, i *do* think it is a worthwhile upgrade form sandy bridge and prior (especially prior).  I say this not based on just simple raw speed of the processor, i say this based on what the Z170 platform affords you.  That, in my opinion is where the real upgrades lie.

    "The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."

    - Friedrich Nietzsche

  • IsilithTehrothIsilithTehroth Member RarePosts: 616

    No point to upgrade still even if have have a Sandybridge i5. Now once they do the stacked ram or turbo/overclock will beat previous i5 by a large margin then id upgrade. 

    With a CM 212 Hyper I am Oc'd with my Ivybridge to 4.4ghz also DDR4 still isnt worth the upgrade yet. Software still really isn't pushing hardware to advance that much, not to mention most of the current market is geared for mobile applications.

    Once they get something worthwhile like they've been promising then i'd argue about switching. Its both a con and pro for gamers. Less upgrades, but less jumps in video game technology.

     

    Also its really Shtty how Intel just keeps their older model Cpus at the same cost as their newer ones so we are forced to buy it and buying refurbished/used technology is always a gamble. 

    MurderHerd

  • MukeMuke Member RarePosts: 2,614
    All fun, but what is the gain here unless looking at higher benchmark scores and not noticing better performance with the naked eye?

    "going into arguments with idiots is a lost cause, it requires you to stoop down to their level and you can't win"

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