If you follow the CPU market closely then you know what Intel plans for the near future – in a few months time the current flagship Haswell architecture will be retired in favor of the more progressive and power-efficient 14 nm Broadwell generation. Broadwell will then be followed by Skylake and Skymont but the further down the road we go the less information there is.
Fortunately there are now some more details on the upcoming Skylake generation. Just like Haswell and Broadwell, Skylake will have performance models with the H designation, U chips for notebooks and ultrabooks and Y processors for tablets and other similar devices. Each category will enjoy between 4 and 15 models that will differ in the number of processing cores used, clock speed, cache memory size, integrated video features, TDP and presence of the Intel vPro technology.
The Intel Skylake Y processors will be sold under the Core M brand name and will have two cores only with Hyper-Threading technology enabled and integrated GT2 graphics. Some models will have 4 MB of L3 cache and vPro, others will have 3 MB of L3 cache and no support for Intel vPro. All Skylake Y chips will support Turbo Boost.
The Skylake U processors will power the Core, Pentium and Celeron lines and all of them will have two processing cores with TDP of 15W or 28W. The Core i5 and i7 models with TDP of 15W will have 3 MB and 4 MB of L3 cache, accordingly. Both Core i5 and i7 processors will have GT2 or GT3e graphics with Hyper-Threading support and Turbo Boost. Some models will support Intel vPro. The future Core i5s processor with TDP of 28 watts will have GT3e graphics, while the upcoming 28W TDP Core i7s will have GT3 graphics. Getting down to Core i3 processors we will see that they will have GT2 graphics and 3 MB of L3 cache for Core i3 models with TDP of 15 watts; the 28W TDP Core i3 models will have GT3e graphics. As to Pentium and Celeron – they will not support Hyper-Threading technology and will have GT1 graphics as well as 2 MB of L3 cache.
The high performance Skylake H chips will carry the Core i5 and Core i7 logos and will have four processing cores with TDP of 45W; some models will be down to 35W of TDP. All models will support Intel vPro. The Core i3 models that belong to the same line will have TDP of 35 watts and GT2 graphics as well as two cores.
This is it. It seems that Intel does not plan to change that much its product lines as well as the number of processing cores and the size of the L3 caches, found in the upcoming processors. The low TDP is welcome, though. We’ll see what we will get in the end when Skylake arrives in late 2015-early 2016.
Source: Intel