Leaked specs for upcoming Intel Skylake CPUs reveal high clock rates, 95W TDP and more

[lripplinger]

My name not Shawn, but I think your i5 CPU will be find for a few more years yet.
If it still works for you, there is no shame in running an old system. There is still life in LGA775 for those that can use the system. I just wouldn't buy into those systems, if I had the option to get newer.

My processor handles current games fine, not seeing any reason to upgrade.

 

[CaptainTom]

Funny, I had a feeling we would see the return of the 6600 moniker.

I'd like to believe the rumours about a large jump in performance but frankly I can't see how it could possibly be true.

The jump from Conroe to Prescott was akin to 486 to Pentium. A 75% increase in MIPS from the data I found. 50% improvement on benchmarks was common.

Think about it, we went from single to multi core!? What on earth could Intel have up their sleeve that would match that?

It's also worth noting Intel HAD to make that jump, because AMD's x2 was vastly superior to Conroe in pretty much every concievable way. The competition is now non-existent, sadly.

I wouldn't be suprised if Intel's desktop business is largely fueled by businesses replacing units after x number of years because the whole system becomes grotty and worn down, rather than a need to improve performance. That, and the desirability of motherboard features like the latest SATA variant.

Finally, Prescott to Conroe saw a whole new product nomenclature, and here we are just seeing the continuation of the I series' sequential move up the decimals (the 'jump' from 4 to 6 seems to be explained by the apparent floundering of Broadwell for desktop)

I think 10-20% more IPC, better cache performance, DDR4, and six cores for desktop would be about right. I'd also expect the S, T and E variants to offer performance slightly closer to the base models. And although integrated graphics are of zero interest to enthusiasts, improvements in 4k and h265 performance may tick a few boxes for some organisations.

Yeah I would say expect a Sandy-Bridge level jump at best, and expect a 10-20% performance increase in reality.

Then again AMD's Zen might have Intel not necessarily scared, but concerned. After all at the minimum the top end Zen CPU should double the FX-8350's performance.

Do you think HMC and HBM will be significant for desktop users?

HBM will be significant due to being used on desktop GPUs. If you meant as system RAM, my guess is not so much. It's the same boat as DDR4, it's not very useful to provide more bandwidth when the software doesn't require it. It would become useful if software demands came to change, but to my knowledge that hasn't happened much since the DDR2 days.
That is unless HBM brings improvements in latency that I'm unaware of, which might be useful it it's a big enough improvement for a reasonable price. But I know using GDDR as system RAM is counter-productive exactly due to the higher latency compared to DDR, is that the case with HBM as well?
I'd think AMD's HSA has the potential to make a bigger impact than the RAM technology itself, because it would make it easier for GPGPU to finally take off everywhere. Suddenly having many applications tapping into some TFLOPS of processing power previously unused is a much bigger impact that new RAM types could ever provide.

Not sure why you think GDDR5 is bad as system ram. All benchmarks and commentary from developers say the opposite. However it doesn't HELP that much as system ram compared to video ram where it is a necessity.

 

[Guest]

Sandybridge i7 2700K here at 4,7ghz on air cooling
I see no real reason to update yet

 

[Guest]

Not sure why you think GDDR5 is bad as system ram. All benchmarks and commentary from developers say the opposite. However it doesn't HELP that much as system ram compared to video ram where it is a necessity.

It's not necessarily "bad". But compared to DDR3, it offers higher bandwidth, but worse latency. The higher bandwidth on system RAM will not benefit the vast majority of software, but the higher latency will tend to make everything a bit slower. Not to mention that DDR3 is generally cheaper, so you pay less for higher performance.
Unless you only have one memory bus available to feed both the CPU and GPU (like the PS4), there's no reason to choose GDDR over DDR for system RAM. APUs might also benefit from GDDR5 instead of DDR3, but now with DDR4 coming out and offering around 50 GB/s (and the fact that the GPUs in APUs are entry-level, unlike the Pitcairn-based PS4 GPU), even that is less viable now.