Skylake[6][7] is Intel's codename for its sixth generation Core microprocessor family that was launched on August 5, 2015,[8] succeeding the Broadwell microarchitecture.

[15][16][17] Intel officially declared end of life and discontinued Skylake LGA 1151 CPUs (except Xeon E3 v5) on March 4, 2019.

[19] The final design was largely an evolution of Haswell, with minor improvements to performance and several power-saving features being added.

[22] An initial batch of Skylake CPU models (i5-6600K and i7-6700K) was announced for immediate availability during the Gamescom on August 5, 2015,[23] unusually soon after the release of its predecessor, Broadwell, which had suffered from launch delays.

Through beta UEFI firmware updates, some motherboard vendors, such as ASRock (which prominently promoted it under the name Sky OC) allowed the base clock to be modified in this manner.

On February 9, 2016, Intel announced that it would no longer allow such overclocking of non-K processors, and that it had issued a CPU microcode update that removes the function.

[32][33][34] In April 2016, ASRock started selling motherboards that allow overclocking of unsupported CPUs using an external clock generator.

Microsoft also stated that due to the age of the platform, it would be challenging for newer hardware, firmware, and device driver combinations to properly run under Windows 7.

[39][40] In August 2016, citing "a strong partnership with our OEM partners and Intel", Microsoft stated that it would continue to fully support 7 and 8.1 on Skylake through the end of their respective lifecycles.

Linux 4.11 enables Frame-Buffer Compression for the integrated graphics chipset by default, which lowers power consumption.

[49][50] Like its predecessor, Broadwell, Skylake is available in five variants, identified by the suffixes S (SKL-S), X (SKL-X), H (SKL-H), U (SKL-U), and Y (SKL-Y).

Other enhancements include Thunderbolt 3.0, Serial ATA Express, Iris Pro graphics with Direct3D feature level 12_1 with up to 128 MB of L4 eDRAM cache on certain SKUs.

Short loops with a specific combination of instruction use may cause unpredictable system behavior on CPUs with hyperthreading.

Multiple configurations are available within each family:[52] Common features of the mainstream desktop Skylake CPUs: Common features of the high-performance Skylake-X CPUs: For mobile workstation processors, see Server processors E3 series server chips all consist of System Bus 9 GT/s, maximum memory bandwidth of 34.1 GB/s dual channel memory.