VR-Zone is returning to their "leak everything Intel has" gig with a few light details about Skylake, the architecture after Broadwell, and its accompanying 100-Series chipset. The main detail is that Skylake, despite Broadwell and its delays, is still expected for 2015. This sort of makes sense, because this architecture runs on the same 14nm fabrication process as Broadwell, but it is surprising nonetheless. Intel could have slowed down its entire release cycle to compensate for how difficult it is to make smaller transistors and keep a steady "Tick-Tock".

Or maybe they hope that the process shrink after Skylake, Cannonlake at 10nm, will be on schedule?

Image Credit: VR-Zone

The second major detail is the available sockets. A couple of years ago, there was a fear that Intel would drop LGA sockets, starting with Broadwell, and switch entirely to the non-replaceable BGA soldered-to-the-motherboard format. Intel has later decided to support LGA with Broadwell and that will continue with Skylake.

This leads us to the third major detail product categories. There will be four of them in the consumer range: H (BGA) for regular notebooks, Y (BGA) for desktops and all-in-ones, U (BGA) for ultrabooks, and S (LGA) for standard desktop computers. The slide lists a few more details which I believe signify core count and GPU version. If so, the lineup of Skylake processors would be the following:

  • (BGA) Quad Core Skylake-H with GT2 Graphics
  • (BGA) Quad Core Skylake-H with GT4e Graphics, the successor to Iris Pro.
  • (BGA) Dual Core Skylake-Y with GT2 Graphics
  • (BGA) Dual Core Skylake-U with GT2 Graphics
  • (BGA) Dual Core Skylake-U with GT3e Iris Pro Graphics
  • (LGA) Quad Core Skylake-S with GT2 Graphics
  • (LGA) Dual Core Skylake-S with GT2 Graphics
  • (LGA) Quad Core Skylake-S with GT4e Graphics, the successor to Iris Pro.

The inclusion of an enthusiast, LGA SKU with GT4e graphics is promising, especially for us. We, of course, continue to want products that we can, you know, buy and put into our desktops at will. It will certainly be interesting to see how these GPUs perform and it could lead to some healthy SteamOS builds.

There's a lot of information here. Expect us to chew on this over the next little while.