Intel Skylake will not be a SoC chip

Now that Intel's Haswell processor is out, details are starting to leak about the chip giant's next generations. Next year we can expect Broadwell, a 14nm shrink of Haswell with Gen8 integrated graphics, and in the first half of 2015 the chip giant is expected to introduce Skylake, a new 14nm architecture with Gen9 integrated graphics.

One of the first surprises about Skylake is that the chip will not have a SoC design - just like Haswell the processor will still require a motherboard chipset. Besides improved integrated graphics, Skylake will be the first mainstream platform from Intel to support dual-channel DDR4 memory, and it will also introduce PCI Express 4.0, which offers double the bandwidth of PCI Express 3.0. Other improvements include the AVX 3.2 instruction set, as well as SATA Express, a new storage interface with a bandwidth of 10-16GB/s. As reported earlier this year on DV Hardware, the SATA Express interface uses the PCI Express interface for client storage and enables transfer speeds of up to 1GB/s per lane.



Sources: WCCFTech and ThinkComputers