Intel 14nm “Skylake” Will Support DDR4, PCIe 4.0 and SATA “Express”

According to a report by the German website PCGamesHardware, we will see Intel’s 14nm SkyLake platform revolutionise the PC market. The new Intel platform, based on a second incarnation of the 14nm process, will bring DDR4 memory support, PCI Express Generation 4.0 support and SATA Express support.

Intel’s Skylake will introduce their 9th generation of integrated graphics processors in addition to support for the latest DDR4 memory which we are just starting to see arrive in certain industrial segments. Intel’s Skylake certainly won’t be the first to bring DDR4 as Haswell-E in mid-late 2014 will also bring quad channel DDR4 support. Skylake itself is the redesign of the 14nm process, aka of Broadwell. Broadwell in itself is a tick of the Haswell architecture – that is a reduced transistor size of the same Haswell architecture while Skylake is a tock of Broadwell which is an entire architecture design overhaul.

Furthermore, Skylake brings PCIe 4.0 support (which we recently detailed here) and both AMD and Nvidia should have PCIe 4.0 compatible graphics card ready for the launch of Skylake. Finally Skylake adds support for “SATA Express” which is a new SATA standard offering 16 Gb/s – that’s up from the 6 Gb/s currently on offer with SATA III. Best estimates suggest we will see Skylake in late 2015 or early/mid 2016.

Image courtesy of PCGamesHardware.de