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In the last few years, reviewing an Intel CPU from a gaming perspective has always been something of a challenge. Typically, the conclusion is this - if you already own a modern Intel chip, there's little reason to upgrade; but if you're buying or constructing a new PC, there's nothing better on the market. Gone are the days of the first and second-gen Core (codenamed Nehalem and Sandy Bridge), which offered substantial generational improvements. Intel's focus is now firmly on mobile, where efficiency takes point over raw performance, which serves to diminish the excitement over a new desktop release.There's a strong argument that Intel's latest processing architecture - Skylake - follows the same strategy. Break out your synthetic benchmarks and your video encoders and performance increases over the outgoing Haswell once again only show an iterative uplift. However, based on our testing, Skylake is more interesting than the benchmarks would have you believe.
Part of its fascination is based on the fact that the new processor actually carries two generations worth of optimisations - Intel's recent Broadwell architecture rolled out fully on mobile, but only had a very limited release on desktop. Owing to delays with its cutting-edge 14nm production technology, Intel only released two niche Broadwell processors with most of the desktop line skipping straight ahead to Skylake. On top of that, the latest Intel architecture is surrounded by an entirely new platform - which has the possibility of bringing its own performance improvements into the mix.
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