Skylake 'Speed Shift' coming to Windows 10 in November

[Dave2150]

Quite an interesting article about it here: http://anandtech.com/show/9751/examining-intel-skylake-speed-shift-more-responsive-processors

In short, Skylake will be able to increase clock rates to full speed faster than previous generations. This will mean many tasks will be completed faster, especially those that only require 100% CPU for a short period.

Examples on the performance gains:

Of course those who disable all C states and run their CPU at max frequency 24/7 will see no benefit from this, though those of us who like having a power efficient system that doesn't produce extra heat in the summer will benefit

 

[Dave2150]

They're really scraping the barrel now.

At least they are innovating still - 'Speed Shift' is absolutely great for mobile use, and still decent for desktop use.

Who'd be unhappy with a small performance increase? I'm certainly not, roll on the november Windows 10 patch

 

[Dave2150]

I believe it's down to lack of real hardware progress over the last few years. Things like this just seem to highlight lack of real progress and irritate people.

Skylake lacks real tangible improvement over past mainstream chips yet prices have gone through the roof. Obviously people aren't going to be over the moon.

Oh well another 5 years from Intel and it might be worth people moving on from Sandybridge

AMD could bring some noise with Zen next year but remain skeptical due to previous releases. Yeah it's a boring time in the CPU space atm.

Skylake/Z170 does bring tangible benefits - the chipset is vastly superior to Z97, plus Skylake is a much more consistent overclocker - pretty much all are guaranteed to do 4.6/4.7Ghz easily - something that cannot be said for the 4770k or 4790k. My own sample does 4.9Ghz stable on air - though I run it at 4.7Ghz as it does this on a nice and cool 1.3v.

Z170 gives you 20! more PCI-E v3 lanes for use by M.2 ssd's compared to Z97 also.

Though most people are disappointed as the CPU is only 5-10% faster than Haswell, which is understandable. Though for people buying new, Skylake is the obvious choice going forward (talking about mainstream market, not the enthusiast CPU's).

 

[Dave2150]

Wow everyone so salty because it's Intel.

Improvements are good, especially when it's a more efficient way of using existing hardware.

Nobody's going to sit there with the stopwatch out to count the gains, but it'll go a small way towards making a system feel snappier.

Yeh my thoughts exactly.

Sure, this is not a revolutionary new technology - but it's something new at least, that's already in Intel's next generation. Better than nothing!

 

[Dave2150]

Only problem I see with the 6700k is the insanely high price. On devils canyon 4790k, 4.7ghz was pretty much the norm. Owned two which done this easily, had a 4770k prior to those which got to 4.6ghz. Which was pretty ok for one of theese.

I got my 6700k for £320 from OCUK on day one. The price now is way to high, agreed.

Though I imagine it will come down quickly, since it's just a supply issue with the new 14nm CPU's.

Also I assume the large retailers/distributors want to shift all the old Z97 Haswell stock also, hence the price insanity.

 

[Dave2150]

If you are on a desktop PC and you have an overclocked CPU it will do exactly nothing as you'll be running your CPU at the higher frequency constantly anyway and you'll have to turn it off.

Not true - I'm running my 6700k @ 4.7Ghz 24/7 overclock, and have it setup with adaptive voltage, so it still downclocks to 700Mhz and really low voltage when at idle/low load.

I imagine quite a few people have done the same with their 4790k/5820k's also - as it saves quite a lot of heat/electricity in the long term

You can set it up so that it runs the maximum overclock frequency 24/7, though this is incredibly wasteful if you want a nice quiet/cool running system.