Intel Skylake 14nm CPUs have PCI - Express 4.0 , DDR4 and SATA Express

While Intel plows its way through the upcoming flagship processor release called Ivy Bridge E, Intel has been on a constant rampage releasing new products to satisfy the appetite of the enthusiasts and overclockers. Without underlining what special features the Intel i7 4960X will bring, and they have already sprung around revealing what to expect in the next generation processors codenamed: Skylake.

Skylake would be built around a totally new 14 nm process design as an update over the Tri – gate architecture. Instead of featuring the Gen 8 GPU, Skylake would feature the latest Gen 9 integrated HD graphics along with the being the first main – stream platform to get Dual channel DDR 4 memory functionality. That being said, Haswell – E ( successor to the IVY BRIDGE – E ) and Skylake would be the only two desktop platforms with native support for DDR 4 memory from Intel and would ditch the much older DDR 3 memory support. Intel were not keen on reporting whether or not DDR 3 memory RAM would be compatible with these line – ups of processors so it seems only time holds the answer to one of the main core questions. Besides having compatibility with DDR 4 memory, Skylake would also feature PCIe 4.0 functionality which  theoretically doubles the bandwidth over PCIe 3.0.

While these are impressive features to be included in these packages, every one knows that there will be no performance gains when gaming is involved when the PCIe functionality is concerned. This is because no current GPU can utilize the complete bandwidth of the PCIe 2.0 due to the limitations of bandwidth caused by the other components and controllers. In addition to the inclusion of the PCIe 4.0, Skylake would also get SATA Express functionality which has a maximum theoretical bandwidth of around 10 – 16 GB / s ( giga bits per second ) enhancing the transfer speeds of hard drives and SSDs though limitations in this department will also be encountered due to the actual nature of the storage device and the controllers which will be present of the motherboard.

Intel’s Skylake processors will also feature the latest AVX 3.2 instructions over AVX 2.0 in current Haswell processors. The new micro architecture would launch in the first half of 2015 and would replace the Haswell refresh platform that arrives for desktop PCs next year.