IMHO it’s less about Skylake being special and more about the previous generations having fairly small improvements over their predecessors. Broadwell was neve

IMHO it’s less about Skylake being special and more about the previous generations having fairly small improvements over their predecessors. Broadwell was never a huge leap for general purpose server performance. At least it didn’t get perceived as such. It seemed to concentrate on being good at the low power end to compete with ARM and more virtualization features iirc. For some, rather like phones these days: they’re good enough not to need a refresh as often as they might have been. For others Skylake is the first real jump / change in performance (the cache hierarchy and core interconnect topology changes are particularly interesting to me). For yet others, they delayed refreshing for longer than they used to: “we might as well wait until the next release now”. And once Skylake was out in all its thousand-different-sku glory they bought it. Edit: typo