14 DAY TRIAL // Even after two weeks since the new Skylake was launched, surprises still appear about the new micro-architecture. Known for multi-core efficiency and extreme multi-core efficiency, the new Skylakes have more firepower under the hood than we expected.
Although highlighted in our own review of the Core i7-6700K, the German guys at Heise.de have been very much impressed by the unusually high results they managed to get in SPEC CPU2006- Suite Computational Fluid Dynamics (470.lbm) benchmark.
Their results show the new Skylake performing two and a half times faster than the latest Core i7-4790K "Haswell" CPU in single thread mode. Although the results are indeed impressive, during our review of the Intel CPU flagship we also discovered the fantastic performance of the new chip during our CineBench R15 and Performance Test 8.0 compared with the latest available Haswell microarchitecture.
Although we emphasized that multi-core processing is only slightly better that the previous Core i7-4790K, the single-threaded performance simply rockets by the last Intel generation, showing an unexpected performance boost.
A new single thread champion has arrived
Apparently, the guys at Heise.de considered that the new Skylake single-threaded operations are boosted by a technology similar to what the guys at Soft Machines unveiled last year where multiple hardware cores executing a single thread of code, and increasing the overall single-thread performance to incredible levels.
It is very likely that Intel uses a similar single-thread boosting technology for single-thread applications, and the SPEC CPU2006 confirms it. Looking at things from a broader perspective, this means excellent news for the PC gaming industry. Since most games are poorly optimized for multi-core usage, the new amazing single-thread performance of the Skylakes will probably increase their performance tenfold, proving to be a more gaming-friendly CPU than the previous Haswells were.
From our test we did conclude that the six-core Intel Core i7-5650X is currently the most powerful multi-core dedicated CPU on the market, easily staying way above the Skylake in multi-threaded operations. But when it comes to the single-thread operations, a liquid-cooled overclocked Skylake would easily overcome the old powerful Haswell being the single-thread top dog from Intel.
