skylake - rochester institute of technologymeseec.ce.rit.edu/551-projects/spring2016/2-4.pdf ·...

SkylakeBy Shabab Siddiq

& Murali Srinivasan

Overview❏ Creation of Skylake❏ Skylake Features❏ The four Series of Skylake Processors

❏ S, Y, U, H series.

❏ Skylake Architecture❏ Skylake vs Broadwell❏ Skylake vs Kaby Lake

Creation of Skylake➔ Skylake was primarily developed in Intel Israel.➔ They rewrote the microarchitecture and developed “speed shift

technology” to create a processor for 4.5-45W mobile devices and 91W desktops.

➔ Skylake processors were developed to cover a wide range of devices.

Skylake Features➔ The Skylake enhancements such as thunderbolt 3.0, SATA express, Iris Pro

graphics with Direct3D with up to 128MB of eDRAM cache on certain SKU’s.

➔ The skylake processors retire VGA support.➔ Instead the processors support up to five monitors connected via HDMI

1.4, DisplayPort 1.2 or Embedded DisplayPort(eDP) interfaces.➔ Skylake-based laptops may use wireless technology called Renzence for

charging.

Skylake Features➔ The integrated GPU of the S series also supports DirectX 12, as well as

some modern hardware video encoding/decoding. ➔ Initially Intel had it so only the K variant of the S series could be

overclockable, but it was found that by changing the base clock value other non “K” chips could be overclockable.

➔ An asrock firmware update removed on February 2016.

Skylake Architecture

The Four Series of Skylake Processors➔ The Skylake processors, are available in four different series like its

predecessor Broadwell: the Y, U H, and S series.➔ The Y series is specifically used for tablets and compute sticks.➔ The U series is used for notebooks and portable 2 in 1’s.➔ H series is used in gaming notebooks as well as mobile devices.➔ The S series is used for desktops.

The S and H Series of Skylake➔ The S series of Skylake

has a K variant that is overclockable and also has unlocked multipliers.

➔ The S and H series both contain two dual in-line memory modules.

➔ The S series was specifically created with land grid array packaging which used a newer socket at the time.

The U and Y Series of Skylake➔ The U and Y series are both

made manufactured in a ball grid array.

➔ The U and Y series contains one dual in line memory module.

➔ Requires lower power consumption.

Skylake vs Broadwell➔ The main difference between Broadwell and Skylake is that the fully

integrated voltage regulator (FIVR) was removed.➔ Broadwell is the ‘tick’ for the 14nm technology in Intel’s ‘tick-tock’ model.

Skylake is the ‘tock’.➔ Skylake upgrades the digital media

Interface 2.0 to 3.0 to allow up to 8 GT/s speeds.

Skylake vs Kaby Lake➔ By the time Kaby Lake starts intel will move away from their tick tock

process to a process, architecture, optimization process technology.➔ Kaby Lake will be a “semi - tock” update meaning it is just slight upgrades

to what skylake already has. ➔ Kaby lake will feature USB 3.1 support and a new graphics architecture to

improve performance in 3D graphics and 4k video playback.

Skylake vs Kaby Lake (continued)➔ Kaby Lake Will only support Windows 10➔ Kaby Lake will also support Intel’s Optane storage technology (faster

SSDs)➔ Kaby Lake has mostly architecture changes from skylake such as moving

to the 200 series chipset(Union Point) from the 100 series chipset(Sunrise Point), thermal design power up to 95W.