Intel Skylake Gets Mixed Reviews

Power advances, performance in question
Rick Merritt, EETimes
8/19/2015 00:01 AM EDT

SAN FRANCISCO – Analysts gave mixed reviews to Skylake, Intel’s next-generation 14nm SoC. They praised several improvements but noted only a few performance metrics have emerged to date for the architecture described at the Intel Developer Forum here.

At a high level, Skylake looks a lot like a Qualcomm Snapdragon or Apple A-series SoC. It’s Intel’s first SoC to integrate an image processor and a sensor hub, blocks that have long been staples of smartphone SoCs. Skylake also supports mobile friendly peripherals such as eMMC and UFS memory, and as with its mobile competitors, power efficiency was a top design concern.

Among its differentiators, Skylake includes two new security enhancements. The SoC controls via hardware its power states, a move multiple analysts praised. It also is Intel’s first chip to use eDRAM as a flexible side cache outside the coherent memory domain.

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