what do you get for going with Skylake instead of haswell ?

[PianoPlayer88Key]

My desktop has a Devil's Canyon i7-4790K, and I'm not planning to upgrade for several generations.  Although, I am already starting to be concerned about RAM looking a few years into the future.  I have my board maxed out at 32 GB, and a couple times have maxed it out between having a ton of tabs open (mostly) and a few VMs.  Most of the time I'm able to keep RAM usage around 12-18 GB, though, so I'm not too worried yet.  I'm hoping that when that does become an issue, maybe in 3 or 4 years (and I'm not ready to upgrade the board, CPU, etc), I could get like a 64 or 128 GB PCI Express SSD and use that as swap.

 

My laptop has a Skylake i3-6100, in an LGA 1151 socket.  (It's a Clevo P750DM-G.)  I plan to eventually upgrade it to the Kaby Lake i7-7xxxK or Cannonlake i7-8xxxK about when the next generation after that comes out and I can get the Kaby/Cannon i7-K for around $250-300 at Newegg or MicroCenter.  (I live about an hour and a half from the one in the L.A. area.)

 

As for Cannonlake being on LGA 1151 vs not, my guess (and hope) is that it is on the same socket.  It seems the trend over the past several years is for Intel to do a die shrink before they move to a new socket, and I believe Cannonlake is supposed to be the die shrink, right?

 

Also, recent prices on some CPUs had me like WHAAAAT?!!  Explain how a mainstream quad-core, 8-thread Skylake i7-6700K would actually be MORE expensive than an enthusiast 6-core, 12-thread Haswell-E i7-5820K?

[PillowSmoke]

         Honestly I was sort of in your position a few months ago, where skylake was a month or two away. I knew that the price would increase from the i7 4790k to the i7 6700k, but I wasn't sure how much of a hike the price would be. I had to also factor in the fact that I would also have to buy a new kit of ddr4 ram, which was a bit pricey than now. I didn't care because the performance increase was already immense, from a 8320 to a 4790k.

[z97]

Smaller chip ddr4... 

 

my favorite is the bendable cpus

 

If you're on z97 or x99 no point in upgrading

[PrimeSonic]

I was upgrading from an i7-960. That's LGA 1366, Bloomfield. That's way before Sandybridge.

You can bet that it was a pretty significant upgrade for me.

 

My choice between going for Haswell vs Skylake was not entirely about performance but about heat output. Skylake has a significantly lower TDP compared to Haswell.

And with my last machine kicking out so much heat it made the room uncomfortable, I was ready for a large shift. (Parts list in my signature)

 

I also wanted to make sure I could use the latest in NVMe, making a huge leap forward from a WD Black HDD.

Plus, with DDR4 happening, I wanted to be on a platform that would allow me to hold onto as much hardware between upgrades as I could.

If I do decide to upgrade again in the future, it's likely I'll be able to reuse the RAM sticks, something I wouldn't be able to do if I went with a DDR3 platform.

 

So yeah, if you're upgrading from a crazy old machine, there's reason enough to spend just a little extra and go Skylake.

But if your machine is 3 years old or less, then maybe wait another generation and see.