TIL: Skylake NUC will get healthy I.O increase in future BIOS
Articles like this one about how an issue with the Skylake NUC was identified, including the background, and news of an upcoming fix remind me of a couple things. First, why Anandtech is a great resource, and second (which mirrors my own experience) that Intel is very open to feedback to the community when something is identified. Even if you’re not interested in the specifics, the article is a excellent resource around the I.O architecture sported by Intel’s mobile Skylake platform.
Our Skylake NUC review had a brief section on the performance of the storage subsystem. The comments section raised a few questions about the inability of SSDs such as the Samsung SSD 950 PRO to achieve maximum performance in the NUC. After some discussion with Intel, we discovered some interesting aspects in the design of Skylake-U systems that have a bearing on the performance of some M.2 PCIe SSDs. These can affect the consumer’s choice of SSDs for a Skylake-U system – be it a NUC or an user-upgradeable notebook.