The final design was largely an evolution of Haswell, with minor improvements to performance and several power-saving features being added. 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. Intel officially declared end of life and discontinued Skylake LGA 1151 CPUs on March 4, 2019. Some of the processors based on the Skylake microarchitecture are marketed as 6th-generation Core.

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.

Skylake CPUs share their microarchitecture with Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Cannon Lake, Whiskey Lake, and Comet Lake CPUs. According to Intel, the redesign brings greater CPU and GPU performance and reduced power consumption. 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. Skylake is the codename used by Intel for a processor microarchitecture that was launched in August 2015 succeeding the Broadwell microarchitecture.

Intel xeon 8 core mac pro 3 1