Intel’s Skylake lineup is robbing us of the performance king we deserve

Intel's range of sixth-generation Core processors, codenamed Skylake, is now public. And boy, am I disappointed.

Most of the fifth-generation Core processors have successors, at least approximately. The Broadwell generation's rollout was slow and messy, with Intel apparently struggling to get its 14nm manufacturing process as refined and as reliable as it wanted. The announced Skylake lineup is more complete, and it shouldn't take so long to come to market, so that's an improvement. But amid all that Broadwell mess was a truly monstrous chip: an almost mythical beast, the Core i7 5775C. What made this part so special? It paired two features. One is mundane: the processor is socketed rather than soldered, meaning that enthusiasts can use it in self-built systems, pairing it with the precise range of components that they want.

The other is rather more exotic: the chip has Iris Pro graphics, and with it, 128MB of eDRAM. Crack open the processor and it has not one big chip in its package but two, with the eDRAM nestled alongside the processor itself. The RAM is primarily there to accelerate graphics operations, but Intel's design means that it is not dedicated to this task. For Broadwell, it functions as a large, high bandwidth level 4 cache (the other 3 levels being part of the processor chip itself). Skylake shakes up the design somewhat, changing the topology and allowing the eDRAM to cache even more stuff, but the effect is still the same: a monstrously large cache for a mainstream commodity processor.