UPDATED 11:09 EDT / SEPTEMBER 02 2015

NEWS

Intel launches Skylake chips to bolster flagging PC sales

Intel Corp. officially unveiled its next-generation of microchips at the IFA electronics show in Berlin earlier today.

The new Skylake processor family was introduced alongside a number of new laptops and ultrabooks using the new chips to show off their capabilities.

According to Intel, the Skylake processors give a 10 percent better performance than its previous generation Broadwell chips, 30 percent better graphics performance, and up to an hour of extra juice in the battery.

Intel famously follows a Tick/Tock cycle strategy when it rolls out its chips – Skylake is the “tock” part, which means it uses the same 14-nanometer architecture as Broadwell, but comes with lots of design enhancements.

The best of these enhancements are probably those found in Intel’s Core M chips, which are commonly used to power ultra-light notebooks like the new Apple MacBook and Intel’s Compute Stick. Most commenters regarded the peformance of Intel’s first generation Core M as a disappointment, but Intel boasted that the new design comes with 40 percent better graphics performance. Meanwhile, Gizmodo claims the chips will help squeeze up to 10 hours of battery life while running three 4K videos simultaneously.

As well as the new chips, Intel is introducing new ‘stickers’ for PCs, that will display more clearly exactly what level of processor each machine is packing.

Interestingly, Intel chose to compare Skylake’s performance with chips found in laptops that are five years older, in an effort to try and get people to upgrade their older machines, no doubt.

According to Intel, “more than 600 million computers in use today are five years or older,” and those machines “can’t take advantage of all the new experiences available today.” Those machines the company is referring to run the old Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors, which were the last chips that brought really major new advances. Intel’s more recent chips – Haswell and Broadwell – were more of an incremental improvement, and that was mirrored by sales of PCs running them too.

The Skylake processors won’t be hitting the store shelves just yet. Intel plans to roll them out in the “coming months”, by which time we hope that Microsoft will have ironed out most of the early bugs with Windows 10.


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