No SoC Design for Intel’s Skylake Platform

We went over many of the features that will be coming to Intel’s Skylake platform yesterday. Most notably dual channel DDR4, PCI Express 4.0, SATA Express and AVX 3.2 instructions. Many people anticipated that Skylake would be a SoC (System-on-Chip) design, but the leaked slides from VR-Zone confirm that it will not be a SoC design. Just like Haswell the PCH will still be fused to the motherboard.

skylake2

A SoC (System-on-Chip) combines the CPU, GPU, and PCH on a single chip die. Haswell is pretty close with both the GPU and CPU on one die, but of course your motherboard still houses the PCH chip. So we really can’t call it a SoC.

Skylake3

Skylake would be a totally new 14nm process design as an update over the Tri-gate architecture. Skylake will feature the latest Gen9 integrated HD graphics along with being the first mainstream platform to have dual channel DDR4 memory. Skylake will also feature PCI Express 4.0 which doubles the bandwidth over PCI Express 3.0. Skylake is also going to get SATA Express functionality, which will have a bandwidth of around 10-16 GB/s. Skylake would feature the latest AVX 3.2 instructions over AVX 2.0 in current Haswell processors. This new micro architecture would launch in the first half of 2015 and would replace the Haswell refresh which we will see in the second half of 2014.

Source: VR-Zone | News Archive

About Author