Intel ‘Skylake’ spec leak: Up to 41 percent graphics boost

According to the leak, Y-series Skylake processors will have a 17% faster CPU, 41% faster Intel HD graphics, and 1.4 hours improve battery life compared to the Broadwell equivalent.

Slides purporting to be from Intel have leaked onto FanlessTech, and claim Skylake will bring up to 50 per cent better iGPU performance than Broadwell.

Intel’s integrated GPUs have never been fast performers, but in the last few years they’ve gone from being utterly bad to kind-of competitive with NVIDIA and AMD’s low-end mobile stuff.

Forget about incremental upgrades because we’re talking about up to 41% faster graphics, substantial CPU improvements, and to top it all up, up to 30% better battery life.

Next up is the H-series – that’s the chip that will likely feature on an upcoming MacBook Pro – which is tipped for an 11% CPU boost, 16% faster graphics, and 80% “lower silicon power”. Meanwhile, the U-Series chips, which are used for low-power models such as the MacBook Air, will get around a 34 percent boost, while the S-Series used for desktops, such as the iMac, will get 28 percent.

Not complete within the slips serves as a whispered K-series type, which happens to be predicted to have a unlocked multiplier for overclocking.

Other improvements we can expect include support for hardware-accelerated HEVC encoding and support for 4K video recording or Full HD recording of up to four cameras. According to some leaked slideshows, it seems we can expect quite a bit of extra performance (particularly of the per watt variety) from Intel’s new chips.

Intel hopes its new Skylake processors will give the slumping PC market a much needed boost, as people turn to their big-screen smartphones and tablets as their main computing devices. At the same time, several notebook vendors will also look to release Skylake-based Chromebooks.