Intel Skylake / Kaby Lake

[The Stilt]

In 5 days (May 12) the Skull Canyon NUC will be released @ Newegg. What are your predictions for Iris Pro 580, Intel's first GT4e SKU?

So Iris Pro 6200 which had 8 EUs already outperformed the fastest AMD APU (7870K / 7890K) in terms of graphics performance. And Iris Pro 580 is supposed to have 12 EUs, is that correct?

 

[SAAA]

20% ahead of 800mhz kaveri.

So Iris Pro 6200 which had 8 EUs already outperformed the fastest AMD APU (7870K / 7890K) in terms of graphics performance. And Iris Pro 580 is supposed to have 12 EUs, is that correct?

It's 72EUs, 50% over Broadwell top and the architecture is also better, 20-30% more in some games with same amount of EUs. I suspect it will be close to 50% better overall in many games, especially at average frame rates.

Plus remember how good Broadwell C is against Haswell just for the eDRAM? Now add Skylake in the mix and I suspect that it'll surprise you at CPU tasks too

 

[AtenRa]

So Iris Pro 6200 which had 8 EUs already outperformed the fastest AMD APU (7870K / 7890K) in terms of graphics performance. And Iris Pro 580 is supposed to have 12 EUs, is that correct?

6200 or GT3 has 48 EUs, HD580 or GT4 has 72 EUs.

Also, i wouldnt say that 6200 outperformed the fastest Godaveri.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2470705

 

[AtenRa]

Hmmm, not playable even at 720p. But i would really like to see the difference between DX-11 and DX-12.

http://gamegpu.com/тест-apu/hitman-test-apu

 

[The Stilt]

6200 or GT3 has 48 EUs, HD580 or GT4 has 72 EUs.

Well I meant those shader arrays or whatever they are called (six EUs in each). 48 in Pro 6200, 72 in Pro 580.

 

[SAAA]

Hmmm, not playable even at 720p. But i would really like to see the difference between DX-11 and DX-12.

http://gamegpu.com/тест-apu/hitman-test-apu

It's interesting to note how well the bench scales with the amount of EUs for Intel in this graph, just as a speculation: 48 vs 20 gives about twice the fps (Haswell vs Broadwell), now take the Skylake GT2 score and suppose you have three times that plus eDRAM to remove bandwidth limits... ~30fps should be playable no?

 

[frozentundra123456]

Yea, but look at the TDPs. The 4 plus 4e is only 45 watts. If both the cpu and gpu are being stressed, I seriously doubt it can utilize all those shaders. Cant imagine that it will be faster than Broadwell C at 65 watts. Seems like something like a GT 950 M will still be a better solution, not to even mention the smaller, more efficient 14 nm mobile dgpus.

 

[mikk]

It surely can utilize all shaders, the question is how fast the GPU can clock in 3d. I believe GT4e requires at least 65W to feed its 4/8 Quadcore and GT4e properly.

 

[IntelUser2000]

It's interesting to note how well the bench scales with the amount of EUs for Intel in this graph, just as a speculation: 48 vs 20 gives about twice the fps (Haswell vs Broadwell), now take the Skylake GT2 score and suppose you have three times that plus eDRAM to remove bandwidth limits... ~30fps should be playable no?

It's not 48EUs versus 20EUs, but 48EUs + eDRAM(100GB/s equivalent bandwidth) versus 20EUs. You'll see that in most cases, the difference isn't even 2x: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9320/intel-broadwell-review-i7-5775c-i5-5675c/7

You don't see a car going 4x the speed because the highway speed limits are increased by 2x and car maximum speeds are increased by 2x do you? You need both to enable the 2x speed. Same as with matching memory banwidth and GPU compute performance. You need 2x bandwidth for a 2x GPU to be 2x as fast as 1x GPU with 1x the bandwidth.

It's about 80%. Without the eDRAM, the performance difference between 48EU and 24EU parts lie in the 20-30% range. Pretty poor. Of course you have situations like Haswell's 15W GT3 where its so severely bound with TDP that the gain drops to 5-15%.

Anyways, we don't need to use wild speculations. Because some datapoints are already available for us. Intel claims 50% boost versus previous generation at same TDP.

72EU versus 48EUs. The scaling is about 60%, so you are getting 30% from that alone. The rest 20-25% comes from Gen 9 over Gen 8. At higher resolutions and settings, the texture compression technology and other enhancements will allow the gains to be greater than that, reducing the deficiency it has against Nvidia/AMD parts. Of course, that's against Geforce 750/Ti parts. This year, the pure gains of 16nm generation will beat the Iris Pro whatever to a pulp.

Intel seems to be a year late in both graphics and mobile. I wonder what their R&D investments are doing nowadays?

Also, i wouldnt say that 6200 outperformed the fastest Godaveri.

[URL]http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2470705[/URL]

The reason it varies a lot is because its Skylake that brings the architecture on par with the graphics players like AMD/Nvidia. You'll notice that in benchmarks. Broadwell is still deficient when it starts getting GPU limited. Fortunately for Intel, things like texture compression is a one-time low hanging fruit enhancement. So they won't be so far behind in the future.

 

[frozentundra123456]

It surely can utilize all shaders, the question is how fast the GPU can clock in 3d. I believe GT4e requires at least 65W to feed its 4/8 Quadcore and GT4e properly.

I guess I should have made my post more clear. When I said "utilize all the shaders" I meant at the maximum frequency as well.

 

[LTC8K6]

Wiki shows core configs:

IP6200 384:48:6 8th gen 128mb edram
HD530 192:24:3 9th gen no edram
IRIS 540/550 384:48:6 9th gen 64mb edram
IP580 576:72:9 9th gen 64/128mb edram

 

[Sweepr]

The Skull Canyon NUC is Here!

I’ve finally received the NUC6i7KYK which many know better as the Skull Canyon NUC. Many consider this as the most interesting NUC release in years.

...I’ll still need to run some benchmarks and write a full review of the unit. Expect to read it here early next week!

http://nucblog.net/2016/05/skull-canyon-nuc-is-here-nuc6i7kyk


Choosing the Right SSD for a Skylake-U System

Our Skylake NUC review had a brief section on the performance of the storage subsystem. The comments section raised a few questions about the inability of SSDs such as the Samsung SSD 950 PRO to achieve maximum performance in the NUC. After some discussion with Intel, we discovered some interesting aspects in the design of Skylake-U systems that have a bearing on the performance of some M.2 PCIe SSDs. These can affect the consumer's choice of SSDs for a Skylake-U system - be it a NUC or an user-upgradeable notebook.

www.anandtech.com/show/10303/choosing-the-right-ssd-for-a-skylakeu-system


The Best Z170 Motherboard

Presented here are the best of the current crop of Z170 motherboards, along with an alternative for each in case the primary pick doesn’t fit your fancy. We’ll also explain why each of these motherboards are special in some way, representing their manufacturers’ best efforts to go above and beyond the mainstream.

Note that if you're looking for something other than Z170 boards for Skylake, take a gander over at our Best gaming motherboards guide, where we've previously covered some of the other options.

www.pcgamer.com/the-best-z170-motherboard


How to overclock Skylake processors

Fundamentally overclocking a Skylake processor is the same as overclocking a Haswell processor. Therefore our Haswell overclocking guide published two years ago is still a good guideline. However with Skylake quite a number of details are slightly different. Enough reason for a completely new tutorial. This article is primarily aimed at users of air or water cooling.

Skylake vs. Haswell

For overclockers these are the most important differences between Skylake and its predecessor Haswell:

Baseclock (bClk) no longer influences the PCI-Express controller, which is why you can freely set it to any value.
CPU-multiplier can be set up to 83x.
Memory clock frequency can be adjusted in steps of 100/133 MHz instead of 200/266 MHz.
The change to DDR4 makes higher memory clock frequencies possible.
The integrated voltage controller (FIVR) is gone. The motherboard is responsible for supplying all voltages for the CPU, just like in the pre-Haswell era.

http://us.hardware.info/reviews/6513/how-to-overclock-skylake-processors

 

[DidelisDiskas]

It looks like this Skull Canyon NUC could get pretty loud considering the specs.

 

[Burpo]

*Support for user-replaceable third party lids.

Expect to see some good size heatsinks..

 

[SpaceBeer]

Is it possible to set all cores of locked Skylake CPU to run at Turbo Boost clock on H170 or B150 boards? I would like to buy i5-6600 and it would be great if all cores could work at 3.9 GHz

 

[Sweepr]

Unreleased Celeron, Pentium and Core i3 desktop CPUs spotted

Earlier this week, Intel published a Product Change Notification (PCN) document that revealed several upcoming Celeron, Pentium and Core i3 processors. They are likely to be launched during next Skylake refresh. New Core i3 CPUs are Core i3-6120, i3-6120T and i3-6320T. Pentium family will be refreshed with G4420, G4420T, G4520T and G4540 SKUs. There will be also two Celeron SKUs, G3920T and G3940...

www.cpu-world.com/news_2016/2016051...Pentium_and_Core_i3_desktop_CPUs_spotted.html

 

[Sweepr]

Intel Corp.’s Kaby Lake Set to Enter Mass Production in June 2016

Will be called seventh generation Core; mass production starts in June 2016
Per the aforementioned LinkedIn Profile, Kaby Lake will be marketed as Intel's seventh generation Core processor. When Intel's fifth generation Core processor family slipped from 2014 into 2015, Intel introduced a "refresh" of the fourth generation Core processors and kept the fourth generation Core branding.

The fact that Intel apparently plans to market these processors as seventh generation Core means that there are at least going to be some interesting changes to the actual silicon (which wasn't the case with Haswell Refresh).

Additionally, according to the profile, Intel plans to take Kaby Lake into "HVM," or "High Volume Manufacturing," in June 2016. If we assume a roughly three-month cycle time (i.e. the typical time it takes for a wafer to fully process), then investors should expect systems based on Kaby Lake to be widely available in the fall.

www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/05/10/intel-corps-kaby-lake-set-to-enter-mass-production.aspx

 

[t0mt0m]

*Support for user-replaceable third party lids.

Expect to see some good size heatsinks..

Is the mainboard access to the CPU, heatsink fan on the underside of the mainboard if the NUC is right way up?

 

[dark zero]

Poor HEDT... Is behind too much now and Bristol Ridge is now DOA.

 

[Sweepr]

The team behind Skull Canyon did a Reddit AMA:

We’re the Intel team behind the new Skull Canyon gaming NUC, AMA!

Most graphics cards will support hot plug based on our testing. Vive and Oculus do not see any differences in graphics cards. At this time, there are no plans for bundling the external GPU box.

Most graphics cards will support hot plug based on our testing. Vive and Oculus do not see any differences in graphics cards. At this time, there are no plans for bundling the external GPU box.

Understand about perception with Intel Graphics and gaming. Iris Pro has come a long way in the past few years. Check out this link for the list of tested games on Skull Canyon. Some of the games on the list include Battlefield: Hardline and Grand Theft Auto V

Gamers are huge spectrum. Completely agree that there are gamers that would never want anything but a full tower rig that is completely maxed out and for them Skull Canyon doesn't make sense. But there are also lots of folks that don't want the big tower, whether because they want it connected to their TV in the living room or because they want to take it to LAN parties or because they play indie games and they don't need that level of performance.

I have no data on Civ VI, but it runs Civ V with settings at high with no issues.

In the other NUC6 products, the processor does not support HDMI 2.0, so unfortunately either could the NUC. But rest assured that future NUCs will continue along with HDMI 2.0 like Skull Canyon.

This has been the biggest challenge with the design and it took multiple iterations of the vents, fan design and overall placement of all the internal components. Fortunately we have some of the best engineers on the planet working here!

Iris graphics today does perform as well or better than entry level add in graphics cards. Obviously moving forward we anticipate that both the internal and external graphics will continue to advance in capabilities and performance. To your second question, it's been awesome! Been working on this team since the inception of the concept that turned in the NUC products. Tons of challenges around size and particularly thermals - but we have a fantastic engineering team that is always been able to find the path forward

Let’s start with the important stuff first – I ate the same thing this morning that I eat every day for breakfast: 2 scrambled eggs, English muffin and 3 mandarin oranges. As for Skull Canyon and gaming. What make Skull Canyon so exciting is that we have managed to create a unique combination of performance, size and thermals. These three taken together mean that Skull Canyon can play most games on the market today and still be less than .7 L in size (that’s smaller than 2 cans of soda!). The unique thermal design means that the unit is very quiet even when being pushed to the limit.

We see the product as either gaming (where size matters - connected to a TV or portable for LAN parties), prosumers and workstation applications. The pricing is right around where we were targeting during the planning stages for the product (the goal was to ensure that someone could build a full unit for $999)

I don't have any benchmarks today that I can share publicly (Intel's rules on benchmark sharing are pretty stringent). Note that we just sent out a bunch of Skull Canyon to leading tech publications for reviews. You should begin seeing benchmark data from them in the next week or so.

Yes, the 6th gen NUCs have been receiving some negative reviews, and rightfully so. Fortunately, we have resolved the issue with a BIOS update and all of the products being built now have the fix in place and as long as you update the BIOS on a unit that you might purchase, you will be fine. Skull Canyon does not have this same issue.

We do have Iris graphics (not Iris Pro however) in a couple of other NUCs with i5 and i7 processors. As for on Compute Sticks, we don't have plans today to do that. The thermal envelope just doesn't allow for that much power in that tiny of a device.

We do intend to continue with these high performing NUCs (assuming you guys all buy one, of course!) with future generations. We will have to wait to see whether they look the same as Skull Canyon or we do something else even cooler!

Lots of recent games run great on Skull Canyon. We have a web page) of all the latest tested games. Over 80 already on the list and we'll keep adding as time goes on. Unfortunately to get the device as small as this, the CPU is soldered down to the motherboard, so without some very high tech equipment, there is no way to remove it and change out the CPU.

Right now, we are only offering Skull Canyon as a full solution so no 3rd party cases at the moment. this is driven by the need to manage the cooling solution very precisely. Spinning drives would only be possible externally Skull Canyon just can't fit in a classic NUC case, so no.

www.reddit.com/r/iama/comments/4j15bs/_/?platform=hootsuite

Reviews next week!

 

[zentan]

Hmm,probably we will see some actual quality reviews.
The Gamegpu reviews lately have been useless. 15month+ old drivers,different memory configurations,not worth it.

 

[exar333]

You can also set the max turbo clocks in the SC BIOS if you want to set a ceiling for the CPU and allow more TDP for the GPU. If you are running at or below 1080P for most games (RTS aside) you likely don't need 3.2ghz+ of CPU anyways. Always an option...

 

[Sweepr]

Some early benchmarks by Anand user exar333:

Screenshots from benches. Note I did do a 'custom' run so I could remove the demo beforehand, but didn't adjust any display settings. Ran them all consecutively as well to load the CPU/GPU as much as I could.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=38224545&postcount=177

 

[DrMrLordX]

That firestrike score is on par with my OCed 7700k

 

[AtenRa]

That firestrike score is on par with my OCed 7700k

Yea equal to A10-7870K.

http://www.3dmark.com/fs/7444402