Intel Quietly Speeds Up Skylake-U: i7-6660U now in Price List
by Anton Shilov on March 24, 2016 1:00 PM EST
Intel has quietly added a new Skylake-U processor into its price list. The new Intel Core i7-6660U system-on-chip is designed for low-power notebook systems and provides higher performance than its direct predecessor, the Core i7-6650U, and sits on the top of Intel's 15W mobile CPU stack.
The new Intel Core i7-6660U belongs to the Skylake-U family of processors that feature CPU and PCH on the same piece of substrate and are used to build mobile PCs with low power consumption. The new chip is currently only listed in Intel’s price list, which reveals its general specs (two cores with hyperthreading, 4 MB L3 cache and 2.40 GHz clock-rate, no word on turbo) as well as its price of $415 in 1000-unit quantities. The CPU costs the same amount of money as the Core i7-6650U and the Core i7-6560U.
If the Core i7-6660U chip shares general design with its predecessor, then it features two cores with Hyper-Threading technology clocked at 2.40 GHz (up 200 MHz from the i7-6650U), 4 MB L3 cache, a dual-channel memory controller (support for DDR4-2133, LPDDR3-1866 and DDR3L-1600 memory), Intel Iris Graphics 540 (48 execution units with 64 MB eDRAM, up to 1.05 GHz clock rate, up to 806.4 GFLOPS compute performance) as well as a 15 W TDP. The new processor should also support all the technologies that other Skylake-generation mobile Core i7 chips support, including AES-NI, AVX 2, vPro, virtualization (VT-x, VT-d), software guard extensions (SGX), TSX-NI, MPX, Trusted Execution, Secure Key, SSE4.1/4.2 and so on.
| Intel Core i7 "Skylake-U" CPU Comparison | ||||||
| Core i7-6660U | Core i7-6650U | Core i7-6600U | Core i7-6500U | Core i7-6567U | ||
| Cores/Threads | 2/4 | |||||
| Base Frequency | 2.4 GHz | 2.2 GHz | 2.6 GHz | 2.5 GHz | 3.3 GHz | |
| Turbo Frequency | unknown | 3.4 GHz | 3.4 GHz | 3.1 GHz | 3.6 GHz | |
| L2 Cache | 256 KB x 2 (512 KB) | |||||
| L3 Cache | 4 MB | |||||
| Memory | Dual-channel DRAM controller with DDR4-2133, LPDDR3-1866, DDR3L-1600 support |
|||||
| iGPU | Iris Graphics 540 | Iris Graphics 540 | HD Graphics 520 | HD Graphics 520 | Iris Graphics 550 | |
| iGPU Config | 48 EUs | 24 EUs | 48 EUs | |||
| eDRAM | 64 MB | - | 64 MB | |||
| TDP | 15 W | 28 W | ||||
| Configurable TDP-down | unknown | 9.5 W | 7.5 W | 23 W | ||
| Launch | Q1 2016 | Q3 2015 | ||||
| Price | $415 | $415 | $393 | $393 | $415 | |
The quiet addition of the Core i7-6660U into the price list indicates that Intel is starting to gradually refresh its Skylake lineup of products. It is unclear whether the refresh is conditioned by the upcoming spring refresh cycle of PC makers or higher yields of chips produced using the 14 nm process technology. Nonetheless, the new CPU will help PC makers to differentiate their new offerings and speed up performance in certain applications.
Source: Intel Price List via CPU-World.
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smilingcrow - Friday, March 25, 2016 - link
Why do you care? It's just their way of making clear which are the best chips for each market segment. It's not difficult to follow.jasonelmore - Thursday, March 24, 2016 - link
Mobile is way overpriced.. $414 for a die size that is super small. The profit margins on these chips are out of this world.HollyDOL - Friday, March 25, 2016 - link
Of course they are invented and manufactured to be profitable. But those margins are not that insane as you might think. Research and manufacturing costs (technologies, fabs, pple of necessary skills and knowledge etc. etc.) of modern cpus are probably meeting GDP numbers of poorer countries.hojnikb - Friday, March 25, 2016 - link
Do you really thing manufacturers pay that much for those chips ?06GTOSC - Friday, March 25, 2016 - link
I'm not a big fan of dual cores being labeled as i7s.Valantar - Saturday, March 26, 2016 - link
So you're suggesting that Intel should leave its biggest-selling market segment without a denominator for top of the line products? That seems pretty daft.i7 means the best cpu in its segment, nothing else. What that means depends on the segment. U series? all dual cores - as of now no way of increasing core count in that tdp without killing clock speed - but turbo, cache and clock speeds separate them. i3/5/7 is a decent indication of relative performance. Do you disagree with top end core m being named m7 as well?
Krysto - Sunday, March 27, 2016 - link
Intel's line-up is getting so damn confusing, and I bet it's on purpose so they can essentially "lower" the performance on previously "high-end chips" to make higher profits.They did it to Celerons and Pentiums when they went from the Core-based architecture to the Atom one, and now they're doing it with Core i7, too, dropping it from 4 cores to 2 cores, while reducing the price only slightly, if at all. And most people who don't pay attention to these changes will buy a Core i7 thinking they are getting the "best Intel chip", when in reality these Core i7s are just Core i5s.
Samsung or Qualcomm need to buy AMD already and show Intel some real competition. It's becoming very frustrating to see how Intel is ripping off the market more and more with each new generation because they know people will keep buying their chips "because Intel".