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Skylake (microarchitecture)

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Skylake (microarchitecture)

Skylake is Intel's codename for its sixth generation Core microprocessor family that was launched on August 5, 2015, succeeding the Broadwell microarchitecture. Skylake is a microarchitecture redesign using the same 14 nm manufacturing process technology as its predecessor, serving as a tock in Intel's tick–tock manufacturing and design model. According to Intel, the redesign brings greater CPU and GPU performance and reduced power consumption. Skylake CPUs share their microarchitecture with Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Whiskey Lake, and Comet Lake CPUs.

Skylake is the last Intel platform on which Windows earlier than Windows 10 are officially supported by Microsoft, although enthusiast-created modifications are available that disabled the Windows Update check and allowed Windows 8.1 and earlier to continue to receive Windows Updates on this and later platforms.

Some of the processors based on the Skylake microarchitecture are marketed as sixth-generation Core.

Intel officially declared end of life and discontinued Skylake LGA 1151 CPUs (except i3-6100, i5-6500, and Xeon E3 v5) on March 4, 2019.

Skylake's development, as with previous processors such as Banias, Dothan, Conroe, Sandy Bridge, and Ivy Bridge, was primarily undertaken by Intel Israel at its engineering research center in Haifa, Israel. The final design was largely an evolution of Haswell, with minor improvements to performance and several power-saving features being added. A major priority of Skylake's design was to design a microarchitecture for envelopes as low as 4.5W to embed within tablet computers and notebooks in addition to higher-power desktop computers and servers.

In September 2014, Intel announced the Skylake microarchitecture at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, and that volume shipments of Skylake CPUs were scheduled for the second half of 2015. The Skylake development platform was announced to be available in Q1 2015. During the announcement, Intel also demonstrated two computers with desktop and mobile Skylake prototypes: the first was a desktop testbed system, running the latest version of 3DMark, while the second computer was a fully functional laptop, playing 4K video.

An initial batch of Skylake CPU models (i5-6600K and i7-6700K) was announced for immediate availability during the Gamescom on August 5, 2015, unusually soon after the release of its predecessor, Broadwell, which had suffered from launch delays. Intel acknowledged in 2014 that moving from 22 nm (Haswell) to 14 nm (Broadwell) had been its most difficult process to develop yet, causing Broadwell's planned launch to slip by several months; yet, the 14 nm production was back on track and in full production as of Q3 2014. Industry observers had initially believed that the issues affecting Broadwell would also cause Skylake to slip to 2016, but Intel was able to bring forward Skylake's release and shorten Broadwell's release cycle instead. As a result, the Broadwell architecture had an unusually short run.

Officially Intel supported overclocking of only the K and X versions of Skylake processors. However, it was later discovered that other non-K chips could be overclocked by modifying the base clock value – a process made feasible by the base clock applying only to the CPU, RAM, and integrated graphics on Skylake. Through beta UEFI firmware updates, some motherboard vendors, such as ASRock (which prominently promoted it under the name Sky OC) allowed the base clock to be modified in this manner.

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