14 DAY TRIAL // Skylake is the generation of central processing units that will follow Broadwell, and the Internet is now playing host to a presentation slide holding the core information about the chips themselves and the supporting motherboard chipset.
Intel's roadmap is a strange one, because the company (or the world) doesn't seem to be able to decide which year the next generation of CPUs will debut.
The Broadwell line, which will succeed the Haswell refresh that has just come out (and the summer-bound Deliv's Canyon unlocked K units) is supposed to debut in late 2014.
But even if it does get unveiled before year's end, chances are that shipments won't begin before 2015, though motherboards might make it to stores sooner.
Similarly, the Skylake collection is said to be scheduled for 2015, but might only reach stores in 2016 if it is formally released in December.
Fortunately, we don't have to ponder and guess about the ETA this time. Instead, we have some actual information to share.
Specifically, a slide detailing the technical specifications (or some of them) of the Skylake chip and accompanying chipset has reached the Internet.
We can see an upgraded Thunderbolt interface, enabled by an "Alpine Ridge" controller IC (integrated circuit).
More importantly, there will be "Snowfield Peak" Wi-Fi + Bluetooth, "Douglas Peak" WiGig + Bluetooth, "Pine Peak" WiGig, XMM726x 4G LTE controllers, and/or "Jacksonville" GbE wired Ethernet controllers depending on the processor.
Also, there will be four distinct series of Skylake central processing units, classified according to the device type they are expected to power.
There's the standard, desktop collection of SLK-S units (LGA sockets), the SLK-U ultra-low power BGA (ultrabooks), SLK-Y mainstream BGA (compact desktops and all-in-one PCs) and SLK-H (mainstream BGA for normal notebooks).
The difference between LGA and BGA is that the latter can't be removed from their mainboard and changed with something faster later.
As you may have guessed, the 100-Series chipset will integrate all the features of the 9-series, though with some refinements. It won't be suffering as many feature cuts as previous chipsets though, because the Skylake doesn't have much else to steal from the motherboard platform (CPUs have already integrated the graphics chip and memory controller).
We should be seeing a new LGA socket though. We've gone through LGA 1156, LGA 1155, and LGA 1150 (the current one), so Chipzilla is probably preparing a new pin/ball array, once again rendering previous-gen CPUs totally incompatible with new motherboards.