Intel Skylake Architecture Preview Quick Take From IDF 2015

Name: Intel Skylake Microarchitecture
Brand: Intel

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, August 18, 2015, 06:34 PM EDT

There are new security technologies dubbed Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX) onboard Skylake, which support new instructions and flows to create and isolate enclaves from malware and privileged software attacks. And then there's Memory Protection Extensions (Intel MPX) to help protect stack and heap buffer boundaries as well.

The cache structure itself hasn’t changed much in Skylake, but throughput has been increased in multiple areas. LLC mishandling and fabric throughput has been doubled, and eDRAM can now be used as a Memory Side Cache. The eDRAM is fully coherent now, can cache any data, and is available for use by the core, I/O, and display engine. There is also no need to flush the eDRAM for coherency maintenance.

Although Skylake is manufactured using the same 14nm process as Broadwell, it offers better power consumption characteristics completely through architectural enhancements. The power requirements for every interconnect have been improved, total SoC power efficiency is improved with many multimedia workloads, and idle power is better as well.

A new technology, dubbed Intel Speed Shift, also allows Skylake to switch P states (power states) much faster than previous-gen products. Skylake can control P states fully in hardware, whereas previous-gen products required OS control. The end result is that Skylake can switch P state in 1ms, whereas it takes roughly 30ms with older processors. Speed Shift, however, requires changes at the OS level for proper support.

Further improving power efficiency are additional Speed Step domains. Speed Step in Skylake supports gating of the System Agent, DDR and eDRAM I/O. Skylake has an integrated camera ISP as well.

There has also been a number of updated made to the graphics engine in Skylake—we’ve detailed those in a separate article, available here. Overclocking in Skylake is more flexible than the last few generations of Core-branded processors too. We talk about overclocking in our review of the Core i7-6700K.

Tags: Intel, CPU, processor, Skylake, idf2015

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com