Intel's 14nm Skylake platform to support DDR4, PCIe 4.0, SATA Express

Shawn Knight

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A leaked Intel Xeon roadmap purportedly sheds some light on what the chip maker has in store for Skylake, the successor to the yet-to-be-released Broadwell platform. Chips aren’t slated to hit the market for a couple more years but when they do arrive, they’ll be carrying an array of new tech with them.

The 14-nanometer processor will be the first of its kind using that manufacturing process and will introduce Intel’s ninth generation Intel HD IGP. It’ll also be the first platform to support dual-channel DDR4 memory but not the first to deliver DDR4 in general as Haswell-E will support quad-channel DDR4 next year.

intel skylake platform support ddr4 pcie sata express

The new platform will additionally support PCIe 4.0 which is said to essentially double the bandwidth offered by the current generation PCIe 3.0 standard. This will likely be a welcomed addition as more powerful graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia could use the extra bandwidth.

If that weren’t enough to get you interested, perhaps SATA Express support might do the trick. This standard will boost maximum bandwidth to around 16GB/s which is more than 2.5 times as much as the existing standard allows for. Hopefully solid state drives will evolve enough to actually make use of the extra bandwidth.

The slide doesn’t give an exact date as to when Skylake will be ready for prime time but we’re hearing that Intel will likely launch the new platform sometime in late 2015 or beyond. It looks like I’ll be holding off on upgrading my main system until then.

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Not soon enough. Existent SSD's already saturate current tech. Easily. By 2015, the SSD's have had another 2 years to improve controllers and we will likely be stuck with SATA express for as long as we were stuck with sata3 which is like 4 years now. No. 16gbpa is not good enough. Make it 1tbps to be safe
 
Nah make it crystal based computers like in Guuauld mother ships to be safe. Oh wait a minute that is in skyfy show. We don't have that kind of tech yet since christians forbid forward movement in the name of religion.
 
Not soon enough. Existent SSD's already saturate current tech. Easily.
Maybe so but I'm willing to bet, you will not suffer too badly while you are forced to wait.
We don't have that kind of tech yet since christians forbid forward movement in the name of religion.
Your an id-iot if you think Christianity stops technological innovation. It has been at least a century, since that has been the case.
 
SATA Express is exciting. But I think PCIe solutions will still be hard to beat, especially with PCIe 4 on the way. Also, we still dont have GPUs that fully use PCIe 3's bandwidth. Imagine how long it will take to fully adopt/optimize platforms for PCIe 4 looking at the speed of PCIe 3.
 
SATA Express is exciting. But I think PCIe solutions will still be hard to beat, especially with PCIe 4 on the way. Also, we still dont have GPUs that fully use PCIe 3's bandwidth. Imagine how long it will take to fully adopt/optimize platforms for PCIe 4 looking at the speed of PCIe 3.
the 2014 generation should finally almost saturate it so in 2 years time we might need it for the high end cards (maybe the more powerful dual GPU cards)
also read this for more reason why increased bandwidth is important.
anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review/10
 
Not soon enough. Existent SSD's already saturate current tech. Easily. By 2015, the SSD's have had another 2 years to improve controllers and we will likely be stuck with SATA express for as long as we were stuck with sata3 which is like 4 years now. No. 16gbpa is not good enough. Make it 1tbps to be safe

totally Agree.

looks like I'm going to go from my westmere build to Haswell E.
 
the 2014 generation should finally almost saturate it so in 2 years time we might need it for the high end cards (maybe the more powerful dual GPU cards)
also read this for more reason why increased bandwidth is important.
anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review/10

article form anandtech is from 2011 so its abit old.

In 2 years time we will finally have gpu's the require PCI 3.0

currently the only benefit are from high end crossfire and SLI setups.

Anyone on a single GPU which is most of the market is still fine on PCI 2.0
 
Well I know when Il re-upgrade my whole system again ^^ Will have what, GTX 980s then? ^^
(**** what happens when Nvidia passes the xxx series? GTX 1080? ^^
 
The 14-nanometer processor will be the first of its kind using that manufacturing process...
Can you clarify this point? With "using that manufacturing process" you mean 14-nm? Because in that case it would be Broadwell, I have problems understanding this statement -also because of "first of its kind", what kind?-.
 
Imagine how long it will take to fully adopt/optimize platforms for PCIe 4 looking at the speed of PCIe 3.

What speed? The electrons traveling almost at the speed of light (<300 thousand km/s)? XD Sorry for the trolling, but I had to take the chance.
 
the 2014 generation should finally almost saturate it so in 2 years time we might need it for the high end cards (maybe the more powerful dual GPU cards)
also read this for more reason why increased bandwidth is important.
anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review/10

Well yeah, AMD cards are hands down the best OpenCL computers. The increased bandwidth will help with increased calculations. Games are not as heavy on computing as pure computing task are. That is why the newer PCIe adoption is slower I guess.
 
Can you clarify this point? With "using that manufacturing process" you mean 14-nm? Because in that case it would be Broadwell, I have problems understanding this statement -also because of "first of its kind", what kind?-.

It should be rephrased like this: The Intel Skylake platform will be the first [platform] of its kind to use the 14-nanometer manufacturing process.

What speed? The electrons traveling almost at the speed of light (<300 thousand km/s)? XD Sorry for the trolling, but I had to take the chance.

Years... xD.
 
I unfortunately bought my pc when the i7's came out and have a 1366 socket, most motherboards of which have only pci-e 2.0. Found an MSI with 3.0 but when you hear the horror stories of boards catching fire, it doesnt sound like a good upgrade.

With the recent update to 760 gfx cards and seeing my gtx460 show some weak points when turning sharply on Farcry3, I thought maybe I could do with an upgrade. As most I am sure know, gtx 6xx and 7xx gfx cards run on pci-e 3.0. But they do say backwards compatible.

So looking more into it to see if it would be a waste of cash buying a card that may need the extra bandwidth, I have to say many forums were saying no cards use the full bandwidth from 2.0 yet, the 3.0 is too far ahead atm. So I can not atm agree with the need of 4.0 with new cards just yet.
But if someone wants to educate :)

And thanks to techspot for losing the unreadable captcha things
 
Well I know when Il re-upgrade my whole system again ^^ Will have what, GTX 980s then? ^^
(**** what happens when Nvidia passes the xxx series? GTX 1080? ^^

If they don't take advantage of a name like that, I'd be sad :p because the name alone would be worth owning one lol.
Well yeah, AMD cards are hands down the best OpenCL computers. The increased bandwidth will help with increased calculations. Games are not as heavy on computing as pure computing task are. That is why the newer PCIe adoption is slower I guess.

Yeah, I mean pci-e 3 is taking a slow start and were already looking forward to pci-e 4? I'm hoping in the next generations, we actually get to a point where pci-e 3 is actually very beneficial.
 
I unfortunately bought my pc when the i7's came out and have a 1366 socket, most motherboards of which have only pci-e 2.0. Found an MSI with 3.0 but when you hear the horror stories of boards catching fire, it doesnt sound like a good upgrade.

With the recent update to 760 gfx cards and seeing my gtx460 show some weak points when turning sharply on Farcry3, I thought maybe I could do with an upgrade. As most I am sure know, gtx 6xx and 7xx gfx cards run on pci-e 3.0. But they do say backwards compatible.

So looking more into it to see if it would be a waste of cash buying a card that may need the extra bandwidth, I have to say many forums were saying no cards use the full bandwidth from 2.0 yet, the 3.0 is too far ahead atm. So I can not atm agree with the need of 4.0 with new cards just yet.
But if someone wants to educate :)

And thanks to techspot for losing the unreadable captcha things

I'm on a 1366 board with 6 core I7 970.

I just recently upgraded to the 7970 Ghz and performance is great. There isn't a huge difference with 2.0 vs 3.0 on this card.

And secondly how would it be a waste you use the card with 2.0 in your current board and when you are ready to upgrade the card will run at 3.0 on the newer board.
 
article form anandtech is from 2011 so its abit old.

In 2 years time we will finally have gpu's the require PCI 3.0

currently the only benefit are from high end crossfire and SLI setups.

Anyone on a single GPU which is most of the market is still fine on PCI 2.0
Anyone on single GPU OR anyone who uses both PCIe x16 lanes on their LGA1150/1155/1156 boards. Remember the bus drops to x8 if more than 1 card is present.

Edit: fixed socket pin numbers
 
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