Skylake Core M Chips To Start Shipping In H2'2015

Intel will begin shipping their first Skylake chips in the second half of this year.

Like Broadwell, the first chips coming out of this next generation will be the "Core M" products for tablets and other low-power devices. Skylake Core M chips shipping for H2'2015 was confirmed this week by Intel CEO Brian Krzanich at a Goldman Sachs Technology event.

Not until months later (likely around the start of 2016) will we likely see the more powerful Skylake processors. Skylake is the 14nm "tock" step to Broadwell and will feature a graphics processor with Direct3D 12.0 capabilities, Thunderbolt 3.0, SATA Express, AVX 3.2 support, MPX Memory Protection Extensions, and various other improvements.

Intel's Skylake Linux support is coming along nicely with hardware enablement patches having been public already for months. The next round of distribution releases shipping with Linux 3.19+ and Mesa 10.5+ will start to have Skylake support but it will be ironed out much better as the year progresses with there already being many improvements on the table for Linux 3.20.