Intel Desktop/Laptop CPUs

Sephiroth · August 24, 2015

So first let me just start off by verifying that I understand this correctly:

The current mainstream platform is Intel's Skylake series of chips (6th gen) which are the 6X00 line of chips, for Z170 Mobos with LGA 1151 socket, and basically made broadwell irrelevant after 2-3 months. The fab process is 14 nm, top processor is an i7 with 4 cores, hyper threading, etc... It utilizes DDR3L and DDR4

The current enthusiast platform is Intel's Haswell-E series (4th gen) and is for the LGA 2011-3 socket, using X-99 mobos. The fab process is 22 nm, top processor is an i7 with 8-cores, hyper threading, etc... FAR more PCIe lanes than Skylake, and uses DDR4.

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So I'm proceeding with my questions under the assumption that this above info is accurate, however feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

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1) At any point in the near future (next ~year or so) is an enthusiast chip under the Skylake architecture (or later) planned?

2) If yes to 1, would it still utilize the X-99 Platform/socket?

3) If no to 1, what would the major differences between X-99 and Z170 be?

4) If someone was planning on saving up for an upgrade within the next year or so, assuming they don't want to drop 1G on a CPU alone (no 5960x) are there any significant advantages for taking X99 over Skylake (or vice-versa)?

5) Are there any laptops planned with Skylake CPUs? (pretty much all laptops I see for sale still have, at most, 4th gen intel processors. Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong areas, but I don't count AIO's since I have no interest in them, but they seem to be the only things with even 5th gen processors)

6) Any estimate for how long until Skylake CPUs become common on laptops?

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Thanks for the assistance! My desktop is only a little over a year old, so at the earliest I'd be upgrading is about another year, but I figure its never too early to start planning ahead. My laptop on the other hand (which I still use frequently) is 5+ years old and runs an i7-720qm at a solid 1.6 GHz, so that I'd like to upgrade sooner than later, and would potentially delay my desktop upgrade if the difference between Haswell-E and Skylake isn't very significant.