At the beginning of August, Intel (News - Alert) released two desktop chips with the Skylake processor. The high-end overclockable Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K processors, and the Z170 chipset made their debut. Overclocking is the process of forcing a computer or hardware component to operate faster than the manufacturer-specified clock frequency.
Several lifetimes ago, I worked in PC Magazine’s lab. In the late 1980s we would see how fast we could get every piece of equipment to work. We would swap out processors and see if they could be modified to be overclocked. Back then Intel kept a tight rein on overclocking and in most cases something would burn out after a couple of weeks of use, or the entire computer would get so hot that we were concerned about the sprinklers going off.
Earlier this year we saw that after 40 years, Intel abandoned Moore’s Law and found that they could save over $1 billion. Today, it seems that with Skylake Intel has not necessarily abandoned but lightened up on their control of overclocking.
I mentioned burning out components when attempting to overclock older systems. This has always been an issue since getting the balance between power delivery and heat correctly balanced was a hit-or-miss option.
Intel seems to have taken a step back with Skylake and returned the voltage regulator from being internally mounted in the CPU to being external attached to the motherboard, eliminating some of the internal heat being generated. The speed comes from the Z170 chipset which provides up to 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes and up to 10 USB 3.0 ports being supported.
Intel’s Core i7-6700K has four cores along with eight threads and has a base frequency of 4GHz on all four cores with a maximum Turbo frequency of up to 4.2GHz, 8MB of cache. The Core i5-6600K is clocked at 3.5GHz, with a Turbo frequency of up to 3.9GHz with four cores and threads, and 6MB of cache.
Simon Crisp at The Register (News - Alert) conducted several tests using an Asus Z170 Deluxe with an Intel Core i5-6600K and was easily able to consistently overclock it to 4.5GHz. The standard clock speed is listed as being 3.5GHz and although Crisp was actually able to boot up as high as 4.7GHz, unfortunately it was unstable and he settled on 4.5GHz as being the optimal overclock speed.
We have seen that they are either abandoning or loosening up on some of the ideas and concepts that they have held on to for so many years. It will be interesting to see what else Intel has in store for the future.