Intel's Broadwell series of processors are going to be replaced with the company's Skylake lineup. While both processors have been fabricated on the 14 nm process, Skylake will present higher clock speeds and additional connectivity features compared to its predecessor. Skylake-S will be the first desktop lineup of CPUs and desktop computer system owners can expect them to arrive during the second half of 2015. While the following is yet to be confirmed by Intel, it is possible that Microsoft Surface Pro 4 is going to be incorporated with a Broadwell as well as a mobile version of the Skylake lineup.
Coming back to Skylake-S, the desktop processor lineup will be compatible with the 100-series chipset motherboards that possess the LGA 1151 socket. In order to target the processors to all market segments, Skylake-S will be divided in to the following categories.
- 35W dual-core/quad-core processors
- 65W dual-core/quad-core processors
- 95W quad-core processors
The high performing 95W processors will be part of Intel's Devil's Canyon lineup. These chips will possess the highest clock frequencies and provide support for more features compared to the previous variants. Additionally, all Skylake-S processors will provide support for DDR3L and DDR4 type memory. Given below is a list of connectivity and I/O features that Skylake processors and their respective mainboards will be supporting.
- Over 10 USB 3.0 ports (maximum speed will be dependent on storage medium as well as other connected devices)
- 6 SATA 3.0 ports (maximum speed will be dependent on storage medium as well as other connected devices)
- PCI-Express capability of 1×16, 2×8 or 1×8 + 2×4.
- Intel RST,
- Intel RST PCIe (4 M.2 or micro SATA)
- 2 SATA Express ports
Not long ago, Intel had announced its SSD 750 series, which is PCIe based storage that is able to deliver impressive sequential and random read/write speeds. Skylake motherboards will also be providing native support for this particular type of storage without users having to tweak any additional settings or BIOS updates.
