Intel begins to sample Skylake microprocessors

Intel Corp. has quietly started to sample its next-generation code-named “Skylake” microprocessors. Availability of samples of upcoming chips means that the company should be on-track with its second-generation offerings made using 14nm process technology and products on their base will arrive on time.

According to Zauba.com database, which monitors imports and exports to and from India, where high-tech companies employ a lot of software developers, Intel has been shipping Skylake processors and supporting hardware to India from different countries starting from late June or early July.

It is not completely clear whether Intel began to ship samples of its Skylake chips to its own software developers in India this summer, or provided the chips to third parties to make sure that programs will support its latest microprocessors when they become available in around mid-2015.

Based on what is listed on Zauba.com, the Skylake chips that Intel has shipped so far belong to the Skylake-Y family of microprocessors with reduced power consumption; the CPUs feature two x86 cores, entry-level graphics engine as well as LPDDR3 memory controllers. Such chips are used for hybrid 2-in-1s, tablets and other ultra-thin devices.

Central processing units based on Intel’s brand-new Skylake micro-architecture are projected to feature considerably improved graphics core, a bunch of special-purpose accelerators (e.g., HEVC and VP9 hardware decoders) and support such technologies as AVX 3.2 (512-bit instructions), SHA extensions (SHA-1 and SHA-256, secure hash algorithms), MPX (memory protection extensions), ADX (multi-precision add-carry instruction extensions) and other innovations.

Intel did not comment on the news-story.

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KitGuru Says: Based on the fact that Intel’s Skylake samples have been floating around for about three months now, it confirms a possibility for the chip giant may roll-out the first Skylake-based offerings at Computex in early June, 2015.

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