Kirk B. Skaugen, Senior Vice President General Manager, PC Client Group has showcased Skylake, Intel’s second generation 14nm architecture.
He showed off a flip notebook based on Skylake silicon, which is now so mature that it runs 3DMark at an acceptable framerate but we didn't see any performance figures. It is still too early and Skylake is still far from ready.
Kirk said that Skylake comes in 2H 2015 and that it should go in production a bit earlier than that. It should be faster than the previous generation and it will ship in desktops, notebooks and eventually servers as well.
Desktops seems to be doing fine in spite of many concerns voiced in recent years. We guess that multiple OS support and 711 million PC gamers are going to keep desktop CPUs around in years to come.
The Skylake software developer platform will be made available to developers in 1H 2015, while the actual shipments come comes in the second half of 2015.
There will be a fanless version of Skylake as well, so things look slightly better in 2015. The next node is 10nm and Mores Law is the law of the land, for now at least.