Here's The Box That Can Turn a Puny Laptop Into a Graphical Powerhouse ('') Intel's Skylake processors appropriate for the MacBook Air were also leaked last week. The improved energy efficiency will also result in up to 30% longer battery life. Last month, a leaked Intel slide deck revealed that Skylake processors will provide a 10%-20% CPU performance boost in single and multi-threaded applications, with lower power consumption, and 30% faster Intel HD integrated graphics performance on average compared to current-generation Broadwell processors. The new spec, rumored to launch alongside Intel's next-generation Skylake chips, is capable of driving up to two 4K external displays at 60Hz or a single 5K display at 60Hz running off a single cable. In June, Intel introduced Thunderbolt 3 with a USB Type-C connector and support for USB 3.1, DisplayPort 1.2 and PCI Express 3.0. Skylake CPUs are also more efficient overall and feature eDRAM+, which can cache information, for increased performance. Skylake architecture is also more power efficient thanks to a new power-saving feature called Speed Shift, which allows the CPU to intelligently adjust its power state for extended battery life. In one demonstration showing playback of a 4K RAW video stream from a Canon video camera, playback was smooth using the Skylake graphics chip, while using just the CPU, it would constantly drop frames. That means Intel has dedicated transistors directly to the job of decoding and encoding 4K. Intel's six generations of processor graphics (Image: Ars Technica)