Intel has not officially released the new Skylake CPUS at IDF but talked about its 6th generation CPU. Besides being faster and using less power than its predecessors, Skylake chips can drive multiple 4K displays, feature new instructions to speed up security operations, and even hardened memory defenses. Details such as specific SKUs and number of cores will be presented in a couple of weeks at IFA. For now, Intel?s disclosures point to a processor highlights.

New to Skylake is a feature called Speed Shift which is a power-saving technique that lets the CPU intelligently change its power state. Intel?s power clock savings technique is fairly rigid today, but Speed Shift in Skylake laptops should improve responsivene swhen coming out of a low power mode (compared to a Broadwell or Haswell CPU) as well as more performance when in a low power state. Speed Shift is just one of the power saving modes Skylake implements.

Intel didn?t specifically say how much of an increase in battery life Skylake would offer over its 5th gen Broadwell chips.

The CPU core itself is more efficient and able to handle more instructions simultaneously than Haswell or Broadwell CPUs could.

Skylake will also have a new memory subsystem. Intel has been embedding chunks of DRAM into the CPU package since the Haswell days to help improve memory bandwidth for gaming.

With Skylake CPUs it?s been upgraded to something Intel calls eDRAM+. It continues to act as a cache to store recently used data and instructions but it?s now fully coherent, which means it can be used to cache information for the CPU, not just the GPU.

That eDRAM on Skylake will also see far wider use. With Haswell and Skylake, eDRAM was limited to one or two chips with 128MB of eDRAM. With Skylake, the eDRAM can now be sized to either 64MB or 128MB and be made available in far more laptops.

Intel is also introducing two new extensions aimed at locking down the PC. The first is Intel?s SGX or Software Guard eXtensions. SGX is aimed at reducing privileged attacks by malware in a system. SGX works hand in hand with Intel?s Memory Protection eXtensions which are also designed to build isolated sections of memory.

Intel?s been emphasising on integrated graphics over these last few generations. It?s here where Skylake gets the most improvements. While Haswell could drive a 4K monitor at only 30Hz, and Broadwell could drive a single 4K monitor at 60Hz, Skylake is capable of driving three panels at 4K resolution and 60Hz.

Intel has also integrated fixed-function support of 4K video processing in hardware. That means Intel has dedicated transistors directly to the job of decoding and encoding 4K.

That same 2nd-gen Sandy Bridge chip had a peak shader GFLOPS performance of 130 GFLOPS, Intel said. Intel?s Skylake graphics can exceed, 1,100 GFLOPS. Skylake graphics improvement, in fact, impressed me on the desktop chip and I?m looking forward to seeing it in a laptop.