Skylake -k confirmed for August/September

lazz said:
Huh.. Aside from the engineers, just about everyone in my corp has 4GB in their desktop (All 3rd and 4th gen Core). A few document control peeps have 8GB, and two Internal Communications folks have 16GB (lots of raw photo and video editing) but that's it.

Of course all the engineers have Xeon based workstations with Quadro cards and 16GB ECC RAM. No requests yet for more than that though, and certainly not a single 32GB install anywhere. These guys are in Navisworks, PDS, PDMS, AutoCAD, Bentley, etc. etc. all day long.
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Wow that's gotta suck. Even S/W development requires more than 4GB. I wouldn't consider a machine with less than 8GB, but I must admit that most companies are cheap and shortsighted, especially with companies keeping PCs more than 3 years. Worse still, companies tend to buy memory from certain sellers that charge ridiculous amounts of money for standard (non-enthusiast) memory.

That said, the current round of PC's are overbuilt machines that should be fine throughout the life of the machine (16GB, fast I7 and a good GPU..though we really didn't need that part). I think that'll be fine for 4 years.
 
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4GB is plenty, IMO, for most office work. 8GB is overkill. No one using Office, IE, apps through Citrix and web portals needs that much.
 
lazz said:
Huh.. Aside from the engineers, just about everyone in my corp has 4GB in their desktop (All 3rd and 4th gen Core). A few document control peeps have 8GB, and two Internal Communications folks have 16GB (lots of raw photo and video editing) but that's it.

Of course all the engineers have Xeon based workstations with Quadro cards and 16GB ECC RAM. No requests yet for more than that though, and certainly not a single 32GB install anywhere. These guys are in Navisworks, PDS, PDMS, AutoCAD, Bentley, etc. etc. all day long.
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Most everyone in my corp has 4GB for the standard deployment system (i5 equipped), whether it be a desktop or laptop.

There are some Engineers, design techs, analysts, and devs that need more than the 16GB that come with the expanded/performance deployment system (i7 equipped), so they have been given 32GB, and a few have been known to push even that much RAM to the brink. Granted, not many of them have 32GB...less than 200 in a company of a little over 20,000 employees.

However, the requirements for more RAM continue to increase as the capabilities and features of newer versions of our applications become more robust, so we'll likely be at 8GB for our standard deploys and 32GB for our performance deploys in 3-5 years (I'm guessing). About 5 years ago our standard deploys had 2GB and the performance deploys had 4GB. I'm quite impressed that many of our performance deploy users get away just fine with a single i7 quad system. To my knowledge, our PC Engineering team has yet to validate (let alone field test) a hexacore (or greater) out of potential necessity for anyone, but I'm sure that day will come when newer versions of, for example, modeling and simulation software pop into our SCCM RAP repository and some end users start placing calls to the help desk over sluggish system performance, even with all that RAM.

Although I doubt we'll see much in terms of Skylake processors being deployed, I'm wondering if Cannonlake will have the cores and IPC gains that will allow these users to stick with mainstream performance platforms instead of having to move to workstation-class platforms as these more demanding applications arrive.
 
lazz said:
4GB is plenty, IMO, for most office work. 8GB is overkill. No one using Office, IE, apps through Citrix and web portals needs that much.
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I guess. I'm at home right now with IE, FF, Netflix and Quicken open along with some other background apps and I'm using roughly 6GB. If you're a 1 or 2 app at a time user, then 4GB is probably fine. Much beyond that, 8 is the min. If you're running a 64bit OS with just 4GB of ram, you might as well just run a 32bit OS.

DejaWiz said:
Most everyone in my corp has 4GB for the standard deployment system (i5 equipped), whether it be a desktop or laptop.

There are some Engineers, design techs, analysts, and devs that need more than the 16GB that come with the expanded/performance deployment system (i7 equipped), so they have been given 32GB, and a few have been known to push even that much RAM to the brink. Granted, not many of them have 32GB...less than 200 in a company of a little over 20,000 employees.

However, the requirements for more RAM continue to increase as the capabilities and features of newer versions of our applications become more robust, so we'll likely be at 8GB for our standard deploys and 32GB for our performance deploys in 3-5 years (I'm guessing). About 5 years ago our standard deploys had 2GB and the performance deploys had 4GB. I'm quite impressed that many of our performance deploy users get away just fine with a single i7 quad system.
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I think for Software Devs, 4 Cores is fine. Even a relatively old i7 860 was rarely hurt by the CPU. It was almost always a memory and/or lack of HDD storage.

Memory, OTOH, was an issue for every dev that got a gimp machine. I'd think if you work with huge spread sheets more memory would also be useful).

We also had 2GB installs 5 years ago...and it wasn't enough then either. We spent more to upgrade to 4GB at work than I spent on 8GB of better ram at home
 
dandragonrage said:
I couldn't care less about iGPU or not but they should really give us VT-d (IOMMU) in the -K CPUs.. I don't buy -K because I care about this feature, but it makes no sense that they disable it in the -K series.
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Huh? VT-d was brought back to the -K Series with the 4790K and I haven't seen any indication from Intel that they are planning to do a 180 and remove it again.
 
nilepez said:
I guess. I'm at home right now with IE, FF, Netflix and Quicken open along with some other background apps and I'm using roughly 6GB. If you're a 1 or 2 app at a time user, then 4GB is probably fine. Much beyond that, 8 is the min.
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Well of course video streaming is blocked at work, so that's not traffic we need to worry about. And Excel files, even the big ones, are tiny in absolute size. There's really no office app that requires an extensive amount of RAM, with maybe the exception being certain Citrix environments. Even then though, 4GB is just fine.

Now, that being said, I'd imagine within the next 18 months we'll start ordering 8GB on all our new hardware and phase that in. It is coming, and with a Win10 migration in 4 or so years it's best to start laying the groundwork now.

If you're running a 64bit OS with just 4GB of ram, you might as well just run a 32bit OS.
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Of course, in the corporate world, especially with engineering of any kind, program and database compatibility are key to a stable environment. *Everyone* runs a standard 64-bit image, of course, with SCCM packages tagged by PC model and role. The descision to go 32-bit or 64-bit at home is a lot different than in an office.
 
lazz said:
Well of course video streaming is blocked at work, so that's not traffic we need to worry about. And Excel files, even the big ones, are tiny in absolute size. There's really no office app that requires an extensive amount of RAM, with maybe the exception being certain Citrix environments. Even then though, 4GB is just fine.

Now, that being said, I'd imagine within the next 18 months we'll start ordering 8GB on all our new hardware and phase that in. It is coming, and with a Win10 migration in 4 or so years it's best to start laying the groundwork now.
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I guess. Considering that every browser regularly pushes 1GB of memory usage, I really don't think 4GB is very much. And I just gave you Netflix in exchange for Excel. Netflix uses very little memory. and I had Excel go well above 500 MB.

Of course, in the corporate world, especially with engineering of any kind, program and database compatibility are key to a stable environment. *Everyone* runs a standard 64-bit image, of course, with SCCM packages tagged by PC model and role. The descision to go 32-bit or 64-bit at home is a lot different than in an office.
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my point is that 64 bit has more overhead and you gain very little if you have 4GB of ram or less.

I"m sure your admins don't need more, but everyone at work found 4GB stifling. I found 6GB wasn't enough.
 
I've encountered many instances in a regular office environment where people are flirting with 4GB usage. While 4GB might be enough for most people, there's certainly enough cases where it may not be enough to spend the extra $40 and double up. You'll also have the benefit of dual channel operation, unless you go with 2x2GB on a 4GB setup which would be a horrible idea given how many entry level computers only have 2 DIMM slots to begin with.
 
I'm more than likely on board to move to Skylake from an i5 4670k / Z87

Its not that I need more processing power or better pci express - I need more memory capacity.
 
definitely depends on the industry the client computers are placed in. I am in automotive collision repair. Just sitting here now with 4 repair orders open, the management system and outlook, I am running 4.7GB ram usage. I have 16GB in my work computer which helps when I am doing photoshop/ads/video editing. If you are in a basic call center, 4GB should be ok, seems like 4GB is definitely the minimum nowadays.

At home, I have 32GB (4x8gb) in my i7-3930k 2011 system and need to up it to 64GB (helps with pro tools virtual instruments etc.

As more advanced software comes out I may need to go xeon or dual socket with more ram support. I am anxious to see all the new specs for the products coming out later this year.
 
lazz said:
4GB is plenty, IMO, for most office work. 8GB is overkill. No one using Office, IE, apps through Citrix and web portals needs that much.
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Disagree. I was on a 4GB system for a long time and I benefitted tremendously from upgrading to 8GB. I work with SaaS for a living and I am constantly working within 8-10 browser windows, multiple browsers, Outlook, multiple spreadsheets, PowerPoint, etc. 4GB was a bottleneck.
 
Depends on what you mean by Citrix. If just server hosted apps, then sure. Offline apps and XenDesktop will need more.
 
phreakpiercer said:
Depends on what you mean by Citrix. If just server hosted apps, then sure. Offline apps and XenDesktop will need more.
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Yeah, server hosted apps only, it's a global implementation company-wide.

There's definitely an argument for more RAM, but keep in mind that aside from the engineers and document control, we're talking about office staff, most of whom are fatally incompetent when it comes to technology (not an insult, the majority just aren't interested).

HR, travel, general services, procurement (SAP all day long in Citrix), finance (old ass banking terminal emulation), payroll (ADP web portal), admin assistants, management, etc. etc. really don't ever come close to 4GB used.

I just checked HP's website (we buy their elite 800 series gear exclusively, again global contract) and all models still come with 4GB installed, in a 1x4GB DIMM format with a second free slot. Heck, half of them don't even have an upgrade option (the SFF ones).

So I'm going to have to say that 4GB is still office standard. I agree that will change within the next 12-18 months, but for now general office staff are fine with 4GB.
 
lazz said:
Yeah, server hosted apps only, it's a global implementation company-wide.

There's definitely an argument for more RAM, but keep in mind that aside from the engineers and document control, we're talking about office staff, most of whom are fatally incompetent when it comes to technology (not an insult, the majority just aren't interested).

HR, travel, general services, procurement (SAP all day long in Citrix), finance (old ass banking terminal emulation), payroll (ADP web portal), admin assistants, management, etc. etc. really don't ever come close to 4GB used.

I just checked HP's website (we buy their elite 800 series gear exclusively, again global contract) and all models still come with 4GB installed, in a 1x4GB DIMM format with a second free slot. Heck, half of them don't even have an upgrade option (the SFF ones).

So I'm going to have to say that 4GB is still office standard. I agree that will change within the next 12-18 months, but for now general office staff are fine with 4GB.
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It's still questionable and unfortunately the latest machines are probably leased for another 2.5 years. I could pretty easily fill 8gb in 2010, now it's a joke. I too work on a work-issued laptop, and struggle to keep it below 6gb. Excel, IE, etc. are all memory whores.

If they're working out of hosted apps, why not use thin-clients?
 
Just my opinion...
4GB: VERY light office work, ie, basic excel, word and light web work. (i never put in 4GB...it pisses people off that their system is so freakin slow after opening a few web pages or taking FOREVER to reboot on system updates)

8GB: Regular office work + light media work. (95% of the office systems at my work that I build)

16GB: heavy office work + media work (my system at work)

24-32GB: Adobe stuff/Virtual machines (my home machine)

64GB: Heavy 3D work/Adobe/Mutiple Virtual Machines

I would never put in 4GB for office systems unless its a basic email/word processor.
 
I need one now! Mostly because my PC is BSODing and crashing a lot for no apparent reason and i need a new mobo (and a shiny one with USB 3.1 please) :D

Forgot to say.. i'm still on Bloomfield!
 
My work laptop (a Lenovo T440) seems to be ram limited. I have outlook, lync, a couple web browsers, and oracle open and about 90% of my ram is being used according to task manager. This is in windows 7 and it appears that only 3297 mb of my 4gb of ram is usable (I assume windows is using up the rest?) Wish I could open this up and throw 4gb more in lol.
 
ssnyder28 said:
My work laptop (a Lenovo T440) seems to be ram limited. I have outlook, lync, a couple web browsers, and oracle open and about 90% of my ram is being used according to task manager. This is in windows 7 and it appears that only 3297 mb of my 4gb of ram is usable (I assume windows is using up the rest?) Wish I could open this up and throw 4gb more in lol.
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Your help desk/desktop support provide any help in regards to that to get you more RAM? When a user calls us with a similar situation of high RAM utilization, we usually take that as bonafide justification to throw in some more memory.
 
Just in time for Fallout 4 and the only reason I said will convince me to upgrade my Q9550.
 
DejaWiz said:
Your help desk/desktop support provide any help in regards to that to get you more RAM? When a user calls us with a similar situation of high RAM utilization, we usually take that as bonafide justification to throw in some more memory.
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My system is under windows 7 x86 so more ram isn't gonna help and I doubt they would upgrade my system to x64 to take advantage of more ram. Its just strange to me that my work setup the laptops like this, when they got these laptops they mustve cost at least $700 a piece.
 
ssnyder28 said:
My system is under windows 7 x86 so more ram isn't gonna help and I doubt they would upgrade my system to x64 to take advantage of more ram. Its just strange to me that my work setup the laptops like this, when they got these laptops they mustve cost at least $700 a piece.
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x86...ouch. That explains why you're seeing a significantly lower amount of available RAM compared to what's physically there, even if some of it is being used by the IGP (if equipped and used).
 
ssnyder28 said:
My system is under windows 7 x86 so more ram isn't gonna help and I doubt they would upgrade my system to x64 to take advantage of more ram. Its just strange to me that my work setup the laptops like this, when they got these laptops they mustve cost at least $700 a piece.
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The machines we got in 2010/11 were 32 bit too. I immediately wiped the install and loaded x64. Still only had 4GB, but eventually got more ram.

As I said earlier, I find companies short sighted when buying PCs. Everyone was constantly having issues with a lack of memory and/or hard drive space.
 
TheOneKnownAsMe said:
Hey man, nothing wrong with that. Plenty of us on that still. :p
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lol well thats teh thing.. i think there is something wrong with mine. the BSOD's and random crashes and for the first time yesterday... while i was away it crashed and froze during boot up (in POST before Windows loaded..). Weird as! But i CBF diagnosing it as the BSOD errors (when they show) seem to be taking the same direction as Windows and other software lately.. and showing you less REAL INFORMATION!!

So hoping to quickly refresh my 3 main parts! (mobo/ram/cpu). :D

Not taking away from this system.. its been boss. :D
 
I really hope Microsoft does away with 32 bit OS versions soon. Is there a device out there that really makes use of that?
 
StormUP said:
I really hope Microsoft does away with 32 bit OS versions soon. Is there a device out there that really makes use of that?
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Still way too much legacy hardware and software in the enterprise segment that won't work with x64. Microsoft would be abandoning a fairly good chunk of their biggest money making market.
 
Most of our work laptops are 4gb models with a mobile core i5 and Windows 8.1 x64. We will be going to 8gb with memory upgrades over the next few months. 8gb should be minimum when purchasing or upgrading memory.
 
DejaWiz said:
Still way too much legacy hardware and software in the enterprise segment that won't work with x64. Microsoft would be abandoning a fairly good chunk of their biggest money making market.
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But how many companies are going to have significant numbers of machines that are 32bit in 2020? At that point, those machines are all over 10 years old and probably closer to 15. At some point, its time to upgrade. They'll probably save more on energy than the upgrade cost to some cheap atom system (which will be faster than whatever they're running).

Also, I've never run across 32 bit software (even in the enterprise) that wouldn't run on an x64 OS. i'm sure it exists, but I haven't run accross it.
 
nilepez said:
But how many companies are going to have significant numbers of machines that are 32bit in 2020? At that point, those machines are all over 10 years old and probably closer to 15. At some point, its time to upgrade. They'll probably save more on energy than the upgrade cost to some cheap atom system (which will be faster than whatever they're running).

Also, I've never run across 32 bit software (even in the enterprise) that wouldn't run on an x64 OS. i'm sure it exists, but I haven't run accross it.
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There are a lot of industries out there (globally) that rely on older but perfectly functional machines and equipment ranging from hundreds of dollars to millions or even billions of dollars that interface to computers for operation, monitoring, reporting, etc. They aren't going to spend the money for newer equipment that interfaces with an x64 OS because their existing stuff can only work with x86 OSs. And dictating that they have to would be asinine.
 
DejaWiz said:
There are a lot of industries out there (globally) that rely on older but perfectly functional machines and equipment ranging from hundreds of dollars to millions or even billions of dollars that interface to computers for operation, monitoring, reporting, etc. They aren't going to spend the money for newer equipment that interfaces with an x64 OS because their existing stuff can only work with x86 OSs. And dictating that they have to would be asinine.
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I decided to search, and they're clearly going to continue to support 32bit, but I wonder how wise it is. So essentially that means they have to support 32bit forever, since W10 is the last OS you'll ever buy for a given piece of HW (or so they say). At the very least, they ought to say that 32bit 10 will go away after (insert time frame for sun-setting support)
 
Intel's 14nm Skylake processors and 100-series chipsets for desktops are expected to be unveiled in early August at Gamescom in Germany. Intel will announce the Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K as well as Z170 chipsets initially targeting gamers, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.
Intel will then unveil its Skylake-based Core i7-6700/6700T, Core i5-6600, 6500, 6400, 6600T, 6500T and 6400T, and H170 and B150 chipsets between August 30-September 5.

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20150618PD203.html
 
lazz said:
Huh.. Aside from the engineers, just about everyone in my corp has 4GB in their desktop (All 3rd and 4th gen Core). A few document control peeps have 8GB, and two Internal Communications folks have 16GB (lots of raw photo and video editing) but that's it.

Of course all the engineers have Xeon based workstations with Quadro cards and 16GB ECC RAM. No requests yet for more than that though, and certainly not a single 32GB install anywhere. These guys are in Navisworks, PDS, PDMS, AutoCAD, Bentley, etc. etc. all day long.
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^^^^^^^^^^ This a million times.

Same as my company.
Hell, the only systems that I have seen here with more than 8GBs are the Mac Pros on the Creative Depts, everyone else have 4GB and some have 8GB.
 
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With Skylake around the corner I just don't see Broadwell flying off the shelves unless you have a original Haswell and want better onboard graphics and you don't game.
 
ep0x73 said:
With Skylake around the corner I just don't see Broadwell flying off the shelves unless you have a original Haswell and want better onboard graphics and you don't game.
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I'd swear I read that Broadwell required the new 2011 board.

Either way, I'm waiting for skylake. I may end up with a laptop before then, but I"m going to try to put off all my PC purchases/builds until Skylake is out and generally available...so September or October (I hope).
 
DejaWiz said:
There are a lot of industries out there (globally) that rely on older but perfectly functional machines and equipment ranging from hundreds of dollars to millions or even billions of dollars that interface to computers for operation, monitoring, reporting, etc. They aren't going to spend the money for newer equipment that interfaces with an x64 OS because their existing stuff can only work with x86 OSs. And dictating that they have to would be asinine.
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They probably aren't going to upgrade their OS at all as it's fit for purpose and most likely air gapped. As such there's no reason to ship 32 bit Win 10 for that market which is extremely small in any case. People who won't upgrade to 64 bit won't upgrade major OS versions for the exact same reasons they won't upgrade to 32 bit so I'm not personally buying the legacy manufacturing hardware theory.

Example: I didn't upgrade my MAME cabinet off Windows XP until last week and even then I only upgraded it to Windows 7. It now finally has access to all 4 GB of RAM and the 64 bit version of MAME runs a wee bit faster although it doesn't noticeably make anything better. I only did it because something in XP was corrupted and I had to reinstall anyways as things wouldn't shut down anymore.
 
erek said:
Intel's 14nm Skylake processors and 100-series chipsets for desktops are expected to be unveiled in early August at Gamescom in Germany. Intel will announce the Core i7-6700K and Core i5-6600K as well as Z170 chipsets initially targeting gamers, according to sources from the upstream supply chain.
Intel will then unveil its Skylake-based Core i7-6700/6700T, Core i5-6600, 6500, 6400, 6600T, 6500T and 6400T, and H170 and B150 chipsets between August 30-September 5.

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20150618PD203.html
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Given the borderline vaporware non-existence of the two LGA Broadwells as of today, I am finding it a bit difficult to understand Intel's business rationale. Why would they premiere an albeit truncated family of CPUs for a market duration of about 6 weeks before they are superseded? Something is wrong with this picture.
 
nilepez said:
I'd swear I read that Broadwell required the new 2011 board.

Either way, I'm waiting for skylake. I may end up with a laptop before then, but I"m going to try to put off all my PC purchases/builds until Skylake is out and generally available...so September or October (I hope).
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Broadwell is a refresh of Haswell and is used in Z97 and should with bios microcode update for Z87 but that depends on the manufacturer.

Skylake is as usual a totally new pinned socket and platform.
 
ep0x73 said:
With Skylake around the corner I just don't see Broadwell flying off the shelves unless you have a original Haswell and want better onboard graphics and you don't game.
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"Better onboard graphics" and "don't game" is an oxymoron.

I'm more worried about the MSRP about since now they want ~$280 for a freaking i5 Broadwell which means the Skylake version is going to cost at least that much too.
 
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