Intel Core i7-6700K Skylake flagship CPU benchmarks surface

[HEXUS]

Said to show comparison with 'Devil's Canyon' Intel Core i7-4790K Haswell CPU.

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[yeeeeman]

This is BS, I can assure you.

[Irien]

Unless I'm misreading things, the big gains seem to be limited to the integrated graphics. This would fit with this series of CPUs including Intel's Iris Pro stuff, I think?

The rest of the benchmarks look quite disappointing, with really only the memory bandwidth ones showing any real improvement over Haswell. That's presumably the benefit of 2133Mhz DDR4 over 1600Mhz DDR3.

Sadly this is all Intel really need to do without any real competition from AMD in the i5+ space. It is a far cry from the Athlon64/Core2Duo era.

[Biscuit]

This is BS, I can assure you.

Go on then, assure me.

[shaithis]

Performance as expected then......

[devBunny]

Sadly this is all Intel really need to do without any real competition from AMD in the i5+ space. It is a far cry from the Athlon64/Core2Duo era.

Do you really think that physics has nothing to do with it? How about the very relevant aim of power reduction, which means sacrificing performance?

Sadly, computer progress is getting very quantum and we don't have any octarine, although graphene will be just as good one day, judging by all the "oohs" and "aahs".

[law000]

Some of the gains may have been made due to the 16GB DDR4@ 2133 vs the 8GB DDR3 @1600. Otherwise the increase in scores don't appear to be unrealistic.

[iworrall]

Some I know are turning their noses up at Skylake because there are no hex- or better core chips.

[law000]

Some I know are turning their noses up at Skylake because there are no hex- or better core chips.

It does seem that they are pouring their efforts into better iGPUs. I would rather see all that die space taken with more cores. Most people buying an i7 will be getting discreet GPUs anyway.
They should differentiate the i7 from the i5 more by having hex core as standard on the i7.

[krazy_olie]

it's probably pretty wise from a marketing point of view to reserve >4 cores for extreme chips. They won't lose too many sales to AMD from that.

[law000]

it's probably pretty wise from a marketing point of view to reserve >4 cores for extreme chips. They won't lose too many sales to AMD from that.

Yes it is, from a marketing POV. What about from a company that wants to advance home users and gamers? You can buy 18 core Xeons, so its not asking much for Intel to advance the game/home market by 2 cores for the i7, then have the extreme chips at 8 or 10.
I really hope AMD nail it with the Zen. I would love to see Intel with its pants around its ankles to force them to improve more.

[DanceswithUnix]

I would love to see Intel with its pants around its ankles to force them to improve more.

Yeah, but that won't happen will it.

From S/A: http://semiaccurate.com/2010/08/04/i...vidia-win-big/

Part III basically removes Intel’s ability to pull the “Nice place you got here, shame if it burned down accidentally” style of sales. Not that Intel does this, just ask them, however I have personally heard several customers say Intel personnel did just that. Proving it is an entirely different matter, but now there is no need. An FTC sanctioned mother hen with a baseball bat and an empty six pack of Red Bull is watching.

That was from 5 years ago, I presume FTC won't be watching so closely now so Intel have nothing to worry about they can just scare the motherboard manufacturers into a total lack of support (again) for a couple of years so they can catch up.

Now, if AMD could knock out a socket FM2+ Zen chip which could plug into all those existing motherboard out there, then they could make an utter killing overnight. If it requires any new motherboards, then they are sunk. Again.

[GuidoLS]

Color me confused? I'm seeing plenty of both 6 and 8 core I7's on the market. If the complaint is about price, if you want Xeon lite, you're going to pay for Xeon lite. But complaining about the price is much like people complaining about the cost of the Titan's. They aren't really meant for the general market - they're designed to be a mid-point between the Quadro (for the Titan) and the 980Ti, or the Xeon and a Quad core.

There's no normal home user on the planet that needs that kind of power. There's no gamer, other than the vanity people with bottomless pockets, that needs anywhere close to that kind of CPU power. There's little to nothing that pushes current tech, unless it's just a poorly optimized pile of worm castings.

As for the Zen chip - I hope it rocks the CPU world. There's no doubt in my mind that it's going to require a new mb, and DDR4 memory, at least. Then again, I had hoped the FuryX was going to rock the GPU world. It's good - really good. But it didn't rock the world.

[bae85]

Looks to me like intel seem to have reached a point where they are either unable to make anymore big gains, or they are taking it easy due to lack of real competition at the moment.

Zen is not going to obliterate intel, at best it will bring AMD level with Intel. As much as I would love it to happen we have to be realistic, unless AMD have some magic potion up their sleeve.

[KeyboardDemon]

Zen is not going to obliterate intel, at best it will bring AMD level with Intel. As much as I would love it to happen we have to be realistic, unless AMD have some magic potion up their sleeve.

Up until my current build every PC I built was with AMD CPUs (and mostly AMD GPUs) but ever since my first AMD quad core processor it looked like AMD were falling further and further behind. I stopped using AMD when my brand new X4 965BE was being beaten in perofmance by Intel's Q6600 processors that were a generation or two older than the 965.

I hate to say it, but I think that the best AMD can do with their next flagship is match the performance of Intel's previous flagship processors, I can't remember the last time that I saw them produce something that was ahead of their rival's best offering.

[DanceswithUnix]

I hate to say it, but I think that the best AMD can do with their next flagship is match the performance of Intel's previous flagship processors, I can't remember the last time that I saw them produce something that was ahead of their rival's best offering.

I can't think of one since the Core2 Duo was released, which is about 9 years ago now.

That said, I think it is fairly well understood what is needed to catch up with Intel: the wide execution you get with an standard SMT design for single thread speed and a cache hierarchy that isn't brokenly slow.

Annoyingly the only really interesting CPU anyone made recently has been the Nvidia ARM chip, and Intel have managed to stop Nvidia from so much as emulating x86 in software so it won't be running Crysis any time soon.