First Intel Core i7-6700K Benchmarks Reveal 10-29 Per Cent Performance Gains

Results have surfaced from the first Intel Core i7-6700K Skylake processors sent out to reviewers, revealing performance gains as dramatic as 29.1% over the Haswell micro-architecture Intel Core i7-4790K during certain benchmarks.

The upcoming flagship processor from Intel will be one of two Skylake CPUs launching in early August, the other being the Core i5-6600K. The Intel i7-6700K comes packing four cores and eight threads thanks to Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology, as well as 4GHz base clock speed and 4.4GHz boost, all wih 8MB L3 cache and a TDP of 95W.
It’s set to be an impressive enthusiast-class processor, and one which Intel claim is the biggest generation leap seen in a decade. The comprehensive benchmarks released so far, performed on Sandra 2015, 3DMark, and Cinebench, indicate average performance gains in the region of 10%, with Cinebench R15 OpenGL tests pushing gains as high as 29.1%.
Any programs using single thread compute you can expect to see similar performance to the current-gen processors, but once multi-threading comes into play is when we see the real gains.
While these benchmarks are prior to the proper BIOS and driver updates going live, we can see Skylake is going to provide some significant firepower. It’s worth remembering these gains are over the Core i7-4790K, which is one of the fastest gaming processors in existence today, and puts it roughly in line with the six-core Haswell-E Core i7-5820K.

The expected retail price for the Intel Core i7-6700K is likely to fall in the region of $339. Will you be picking one of the new Skylake processors up? Performance gains in the regions you were expecting?