Report: Intel Skylake to Have PCIe 4.0, DDR4, SATA Express

WCCFTech has published what purports to be Intel’s Xeon Processor Roadmap Plan for HPC which sheds light on the company’s post-Haswell forecast, specifically the forthcoming “Skylake” architecture that will arrive in the first half of 2015.

According to the report, Skylake will be built around a new 14 nm process design, feature Intel’s 9th generation integrated HD graphics, and will be the first mainstream consumer platform to support dual channel DDR4 memory.

Interestingly, Skylake will also support PCIe 4.0 that offers a link bandwidth of 16 GB/s -- double that of PCIe 3.0 and far in excess of the bandwidth required by any existing graphics card. Finally, Skylake incorporates the latest AVX 3.2 instructions and SATA Express functionality which should significantly enhance the transfer speeds of hard drives and SSDs.

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22 Comments Comment from the forums

de5_Roy

what the hell? the wccftech writer got gen 9 graphics and sata express from a xeon slide? the so called leak doesn't even have nda notice at the bottom, looks photoshpped.
so far, pcie has followed a 5 year refresh cycle. pcie 3.0 launched in 2012, so pcie 4.0 should come out in 2016-17.
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Tedders

Unless I am reading the graph wrong, it looks like Skylake won't be coming out until 2016.
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hector2

I like that the 14nm Knight's Landing PHI, will bring 3X the TFLOPs and 3X-4X the GFLOPs/W of todays 22nm PHI
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hector2

Yep, the "tic" bump to 14nm starts with Broadwell in 2015. The "tock" bump Skylake, with an architecture change, would come about a year later

Reply
jimmysmitty

11086033 said:
what the hell? the wccftech writer got gen 9 graphics and sata express from a xeon slide? the so called leak doesn't even have nda notice at the bottom, looks photoshpped.
so far, pcie has followed a 5 year refresh cycle. pcie 3.0 launched in 2012, so pcie 4.0 should come out in 2016-17.

For desktop, maybe but servers always get stuff before we do. Haswell-E is rumored to have DDR4 which I would expect since it is designed for high end servers and workstations.

I guess only time will tell. But I also heard that SATA Express was to come with Broadwell, the 14nm refresh of Haswell.

It could also be a trick for the WCCFTech writer to get views to generate ad revenue but a lot of Intels rumors tend to be somewhat true.
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rmpumper

Lol. How about taking advantage of PCI-E 3.0 first?
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edman545

The image also has DDR4 listed for Haswell.
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ojas

None of this should be a surprise to anyone, really. SATA Express is out with the 9-series next year, Haswell-E/EP get DDR4 support next year, Skylake being a new u-arch gets AVX3, already present in Knights Corner today i believe (could be wrong about this last thing).

11086033 said:
what the hell? the wccftech writer got gen 9 graphics and sata express from a xeon slide? the so called leak doesn't even have nda notice at the bottom, looks photoshpped.
so far, pcie has followed a 5 year refresh cycle. pcie 3.0 launched in 2012, so pcie 4.0 should come out in 2016-17.
Yeah but that IS listed under 2016 (PCIe 4, Skylake), and this is likely talking about Skylake-E/EP stuff, so it seems valid. Mainstream will likely get it with Skymont.

11086090 said:
Unless I am reading the graph wrong, it looks like Skylake won't be coming out until 2016.
You sort of are, because that slide's talking about Skylake-EP, which would come about a year after Skylake mainstream.

11086215 said:
11086033 said:
what the hell? the wccftech writer got gen 9 graphics and sata express from a xeon slide? the so called leak doesn't even have nda notice at the bottom, looks photoshpped.
so far, pcie has followed a 5 year refresh cycle. pcie 3.0 launched in 2012, so pcie 4.0 should come out in 2016-17.

For desktop, maybe but servers always get stuff before we do. Haswell-E is rumored to have DDR4 which I would expect since it is designed for high end servers and workstations.

I guess only time will tell. But I also heard that SATA Express was to come with Broadwell, the 14nm refresh of Haswell.

It could also be a trick for the WCCFTech writer to get views to generate ad revenue but a lot of Intels rumors tend to be somewhat true.
True. Most of this data co-relates with what i know about Skylake (DDR4, AVX 3).

11086496 said:
The image also has DDR4 listed for Haswell.
Yes, and it shows Haswell in 2014, which means it's talking about Haswell-EP, which is used with the large Xeons. Haswell-E is likely to get DDR4 (there was a VR Zone leak a while ago), so this looks accurate.
Reply
hannibal

11086350 said:
Lol. How about taking advantage of PCI-E 3.0 first?

Well by 2016 we hopefully have some 4K displays at "cheap" 1500$ to 2000$ so we need a hefty upgrade to GPU power, so it may actually be so that we allso need to have faster PCI-E. Allso some fast SSD cards can reguire more speed in 3 years...
Ofcource it can be allso a overkill, but we are talking about enterprice solutions in these dias so fast RAID based SSD can raturate PCI-E channels guite quickly.

Reply
CaedenV

I am guessing that some of those features (specifically PCIe4) will be coming out on Skylake-E and EP, but not mainstream Skylake. I will probably be looking at getting a Skymont setup in 2016-17. Not for the CPU upgrade, but for the chipset features mentioned.
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