Let’s face it – Intel’s latest Broadwell-E processors disappointed many hardware enthusiasts around the world. Yes, the chips are made on 14 nm, they can work in existing X99 motherboards and for the first time there’s a desktop processor with 10 cores inside but the Broadwell-E generation does not overclock that well, brings a marginal performance boost and costs a ton of money – there are two chips that sell for more than USD 1000 and the flagship Core i7-6950X costs USD 1723! So why not stick to Haswell-E then?
Unfortunately things here will not improve much (and we hate to bring you bad news). It turns out that the processor generation that will succeed Broadwell-E next year will be called Skylake-X, instead of Skylake-E. So this generation will require new motherboards since each Skylake-X processor will have 2066 contacts instead of the current 2011 in Haswell-E/Broadwell-E chips. The new LGA 2066 socket is now known as R4 and it will likely come with a new chipset. There’s no information on the performance of Skylake-X but these chips will have 6 – 10 cores too. We will know more when the new chips arrive in Q2 2017.
But here things become more and more interesting. Shortly after the launch of Skylake-X Intel will release the so-called Kaby Lake-X CPU generation but for the first time these chips will not try to steal the performance crown. Instead they will target users who want a flagship platform by Intel, yet they do not want to spend a whole lot of money on a processor. Thus Kaby Lake-X will come with up to four processing cores and a more user friendly price. Moreover Kaby Lake-X may become a stepping stone for all people who want a Skylake-X chip later on since Kaby Lake-X will use the same LGA 2066 socket.
Of course things may change by summer 2017 but right now they seem to be very interesting.
Source: Digital Trends