Ready, fight!
Let's suppose a website got its hands on Intel's forthcoming Core i7-6700K processor, the flagship CPU in Skylake-S that's rumored to launch on August 5, 2015, at Gamescom. Then let's suppose that said site benchmarked the chip and offered up comparisons to Intel's existing Core i7-4790K (Devil's Canyon). That would be pretty interesting, right? The only problem is, pesky NDAs typically prevent this sort of thing. That is, when they're followed.
We're not advocating that websites break embargoes, but since one already has (presumably, anyway), we're not going to look the other way, either. Such a scenario exists at TechBang, a Chinese-language website that purportedly posted the first benchmarks of Skylake-S (fist bump to WCCFtech for the heads up).
Before we dive into the results, let's quickly compare the two chips. The Core i7-6700K is a Skylake S part built on a 14nm manufacturing process. It's a quad-core chip with eight threads, 8MB of L3 cache, 4GHz/4.2GHz base/boost clockspeeds, and support for DDR4-2133 and DDR3L-1600 memory. On the graphics side, the Core i7-6700K boasts GT2 graphics with 48 execution units and clocked at 350MHz/1,067MHz base/boost.
In the other corner is the Core i7-4790K, Intel's flagship Devil's Canyon chip built on a 22nm process. It too is a quad-core CPU with Hyper Threading support and 8MB of L2 cache. Clockspeeds check in at 4GHz base and 4.4GHz boost. It's Intel HD Graphics 4600 has 20 execution units and is clocked at 350MHz/1,250MHz base/boost.
Since the two processors don't support the same socket, TechBang went with two different boards -- MSI Z97 Gaming motherboard for the Core i7-4790K and ECS Z170 Claymore for the Core i7-6700K.
For the most part, Skylake-S outpaced Devil's Canyon, though not always by a ginormous margin. In PCMark 8, the 6700K posted a score of 3,718, just 250 points higher than the 4790K (3,718). The lead was bigger in 3DMark Cloud Gate when using the integrated GPU -- 9,581 for the 6700K and 8,750 for the 4790K.
Things are looking good for Skylake-S, though take all the benchmarks with a sampling of salt, as they represents pre-release hardware with early drivers.
Follow Paul on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook
From maximumpc
from http://bit.ly/1L3agPK
