We had a reader-submitted question this week that asked us what the differences were between Ivy Bridge and Skylake microarchitectures. As it turned out it seems like it’s a question that a lot of people are still asking even in 2018.

In order to compare the two of them, I first want to give you a bit of history.

Ivy Bridge – What Is It & Facts

Ivy Bridge is the codename for Intel’s third-generation line of processors. Released in 2012, it’s a pretty old processor by today’s standards. Compatible with LGA 1155, 2011 and 2011-1 sockets, the odds of actually buying one of these processors new, or even a motherboard that works with those sockets is very unlikely.

Skylake – What You Should Know & Facts

Skylake is another codename by Intel, but in comparison to Ivy Bridge, it is actually considered to be ‘sixth-generation’. Placing it a number of generations ahead of the Ivy Bridge. Released in 2015 there were two key predecessors that sit between the release of Ivy Bridge and Skylake. The two microarchitectures that sit in the middle of the two are Haswell & Broadwell.

Much like Broadwell, Skylake was made available in multiple variants. A total of five variants were produced and this allowed the Skylake to last much longer than some of its predecessors like Ivy Bridge did. This is in no small part because of the five variants, many of them allowed people to use different and often newer microprocessors sockets. Including but not limited to LGA 1151 and LGA 2066.

Today Skylake is still very popular with a lot of people who felt like it was the best line of processors that Intel ever did (for the time), and it’s also popular among budget gaming enthusiasts, which is also why we quite often see questions about even older tech such as IB.

Skylake & Ivy Bridge Differences:

Among many things that are obvious such as the Skylake processors being newer and more powerful in general, there is also the aforementioned fact that the Ivy Bridge wasn’t even a direct predecessor to Skylake.

You can actually see in the above chart the difference of models between the two lines based on the performance.

Another question I wanted to address was whether these processors are compatible and the answer to that is no. Due to this it naturally leads to the question which one should I get? If you only have an option of one or the other there’s no question that Skylake is better. Whether it’s because it’s more recent and easier to source parts for, or simply because better performance matters to you it wins in every category.