Intel’s 6th Generation Skylake-S Preliminary Benchmarks Leaked – 15% Aggregate IPC Gains

The first purported benchmarks of Intel’s upcoming Skylake-S processors have finally surfaced. The benches come from the website PCFRM.com, which is a source we have not used extensively and will therefore be  tagging this as rumor. The benchmarks show an aggregate (and approximate) 15% improvement over Haswell which is pretty impressive, if you discount the process shrink. After accounting the process shrink, the performance gains are acceptably reasonable at best.

Skylake-S’Core i7-6700k finally gets benchmarks – Reasonable increase of 15% over last generation

Skylake is definitely more exciting than Haswell; of that, there is very little doubt. However, just how much the uArch will meet the expectation of the Industry is something that remains to be seen. Hype has been building up for this particular iteration of Intel’s x86 for quite some time now and today we have the first possible glimpse at what the future could hold. The preliminary numbers are here and while they do not completely disappoint, neither do they completely impress. Ofcourse, there are many other standards on which architectural improvement is measured and the Skylake-S 512 bit FPU is one such example. Without further ado here are the benchmarks of the Skylake-S processor the Intel Core i7 6700k: 

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As you can see, the processor is approximately 15% ahead of its 4th Generation counterpart. While comparing clock for clock we have to keep in mind that the Haswell counterpart can boost to 4.4 Ghz (Devil’s Canyon) while Skylake-S can only boost to 4.2 Ghz in these specifications. The Skylake-S SKU: i7-6700K goes head to head with the Intel i7-5820K: a hexa core die (albeit with significantly lowered clocks). The usual IPC increase per (Intel) architectural jump is around 10%, we were expecting around 20% and Skylake-S delivers 15%. 

The Skylake architectural jump is supposed to be very big with significant IPC gains. While gains like these are usually not very apparent on the desktop side (TDP and diminishing returns), it could prove to be a very disruptive uArch on the mobility side. The only apparent problem so far being the power hungry nature of the node. Still, Intel is maintaining an absolutely top-level of secrecy as far as any SKL item is concerned so I for one am definitely expecting something major with Skylake’s release as opposed to just another ‘Haswell’. Given below are the specifications as leaked by PCFrm. I would urge readers to once again remember the ‘rumor’ tag on the top since the source has never been used before

Intel Skylake-S Desktop Processors Lineup:

Model	Process	Cores	Core Clock	Boost Clock	Cache	Memory Support	TDP	Socket	Unlocked Design
Core i7-6700K	14nm	4/8	4.0 GHz	4.2 GHz	8 MB	DDR4 2133 MHz	95W	LGA 1151	Yes
Core i5-6600K	14nm	4/4	3.5 GHz	3.9 GHz	6 MB	DDR4 2133 MHz	95W	LGA 1151	Yes
Core i7-6700	14nm	4/8	3.4 GHz	4.0 GHz	8 MB	DDR4 2133 MHz	65W	LGA 1151	No
Core i5-6600	14nm	4/4	3.3 GHz	3.9 GHz	6 MB	DDR4 2133 MHz	65W	LGA 1151	No
Core i5-6500	14nm	4/4	3.2 GHz	3.6 GHz	6 MB	DDR4 2133 MHz	65W	LGA 1151	No
Core i5-6400	14nm	4/4	2.7 GHz	3.3 GHz	6 MB	DDR4 2133 MHz	65W	LGA 1151	No
Core i7-6700T	14nm	4/8	2.8 GHz	3.6 GHz	8 MB	DDR4 2133 MHz	35W	LGA 1151	No
Core i5-6600T	14nm	4/4	2.7 GHz	3.5 GHz	6 MB	DDR4 2133 MHz	35W	LGA 1151	No
Core i5-6500T	14nm	4/4	2.5 GHz	3.1 GHz	6 MB	DDR4 2133 MHz	35W	LGA 1151	No
Core i5-6400T	14nm	4/4	2.2 GHz	2.8 GHz	6 MB	DDR4 2133 MHz	35W	LGA 1151	No