Skylake is Intel's codename for its sixth generation Core microprocessor family that was launched on August 5, 2015, succeeding the Broadwell microarchitecture. Skylake is a microarchitecture redesign using the same 14 nm manufacturing process technology as its predecessor, serving as a tock in Intel's tick–tock manufacturing and design model. According to Intel, the redesign brings greater CPU and GPU performance and reduced power consumption. Skylake CPUs share their microarchitecture with Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Cannon Lake, Whiskey Lake, and Comet Lake CPUs.
Skylake is the last Intel platform on which Windows earlier than Windows 10 will be officially supported by Microsoft, although enthusiast-created modifications exist that allow Windows 8.1 and earlier to continue to receive Windows Updates on later platforms.
Some of the processors based on the Skylake microarchitecture are marketed as 6th-generation Core.
Intel officially declared end of life and discontinued Skylake LGA 1151 CPUs on March 4, 2019.
Skylake's development, as with previous processors such as Banias, Dothan, Conroe, Sandy Bridge, and Ivy Bridge, was primarily undertaken by Intel Israel at its engineering research center in Haifa, Israel. The final design was largely an evolution of Haswell, with minor improvements to performance and several power-saving features being added. A major priority of Skylake's design was to design a microarchitecture for envelopes as low as 4.5W to embed within tablet computers and notebooks in addition to higher-power desktop computers and servers.
In September 2014, Intel announced the Skylake microarchitecture at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, and that volume shipments of Skylake CPUs were scheduled for the second half of 2015. The Skylake development platform was announced to be available in Q1 2015. During the announcement, Intel also demonstrated two computers with desktop and mobile Skylake prototypes: the first was a desktop testbed system, running the latest version of 3DMark, while the second computer was a fully functional laptop, playing 4K video.