Intel: Core i7-6700K and i5-6600K "Skylake" announced

One of the new features that we already know of is the support for DDR4 memory with an effective clock of up to 2133 MHz for the first time, while Haswell (except for the high-end platform Haswell-E) and Broadwell only support DDR3(L) modules. The additional memory bandwidth should be an advantage for the integrated HD Graphics 530 GPU in particular, which is also supposed to have 20 percent more shader units in the GT2 version (24 instead of 20 EUs with Haswell).

Being "K" models, both the i7-6700K and i5-6600K have free multipliers that allows easy overclocking. Contrary to Haswell, you can once again overclock Broadwell via base clock, but this should not be the case for the non-K chips that will follow later. Another highlight for fans of overclocking: The frequency of the DRAM memory can now be adjusted in finer 100/133 MHz steps, so it is easier to find the limit.

Skylake also follows the trend for faster flash storage with the significantly improved Z170 chipset, which is now equipped with 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes instead of just 8x PCIe 2.0 lanes (Z97). DMI was also updated to version 3.0, so the connection to the processor won't be a bottleneck. It is, however, a bit doubtful that the wider CPU interface would really provide enough bandwidth for all PCIe lanes: It seems that DMI 3.0 is only based on four PCIe 3.0 lanes and therefore barely reaches 4 GB/s, which could easily slow down a RAID configuration with multiple high-end M.2 SSDs. Still: It is roughly twice as fast compared to Haswell and should be more than sufficient for the next couple of years.

The processor itself still has 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes, which can be distributed (x16, x8/x8, x8/x4/x4) for the communication with a dedicated graphics card.