Intel Releases Its First Skylake CPUs: Core i7 6700K & Core i5 6600K

This morning from Germany Intel announced the release of the first Skylake desktop processors alongside the new Intel Z170 chipset.

The first of these 14nm Skylake CPUs are the Core i7 6700K and Core i5 6600K. The i7-6700K is quad-core plus Hyper Threading with a 4.0GHz base clock frequency and 4.2GHz turbo. The Core i5 6600K runs at 3.5GHz with 3.9GHz turbo while being a quad-core part without Hyper Threading. Both of these 91 Watt CPUs feature Intel HD (non-Iris) Graphics. The i7-6700K will carry a launch price of $350 while the i5-6600K is at $243. Today's launch of these Skylake CPUs and new Z170 motherboard also usher in the era of DDR4 memory for the desktop. CPUs are available starting today while other Skylake non-K CPUs are expected to begin launching later in the quarter.

I hope to have up my Linux review of Intel Skylake in the next week or so, just waiting on the samples to still arrive. After that you can expect an onslaught of Linux testing from this latest-generation Intel hardware. For now though you can checkout all of my Broadwell Core i7 5775C tests with Iris Pro 6200 Graphics from the past weeks. Most of the Windows reviews thus far show the i7-6700K / i5-6600K as representing a modest boost over Haswell while some reviews sight the new performance as just being in line with the former Core i7 4790K.