Can Intel’s Skylake Chip Rescue Falling PC Sales?

Intel (INTC) last week released its Skylake processor family, the sixth generation of its Core chip, offering improved performance and lowered power consumption for an entire range of PCs, from notebooks to gaming systems.

The chip giant, in a nod to the range of systems and devices in Skylake’s sights, segmented the processor family by four series: the “Y” for 2-in-1 convertibles, tablets and Intel’s Compute Stick; the “U” for ultrathin notebooks and all-in-one portables; the “H” for gaming notebooks and mobile workstations; and the “S” for desktops, all-in-one systems and smaller PCs.

That’s the hardware part of the story. But there’s more to the backdrop to put the processor’s emergence in context. 

Three months ago, Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich blamed continually falling PC sales on macroeconomic conditions and consumer sentiment ahead of both Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows 10 and the Skylake processor.

Nevertheless, he sounded an optimistic tone: “There’s always a little bit of a stall right before a new product like Skylake, combined with a new OS like Windows 10, which the majority of these devices will run on,” Krzanich said at the time.

“That tends to have people waiting to see what those products are going to be…,” he said, suggesting that once the chip and OS hit the market, shipments will perk up.

At the time, researchers Gartner and IDC agreed not only with each other but also with Krzanich. Each researcher said Q2 worldwide PC shipments tumbled precipitously, with the former showing a 9.5 percent decline, the steepest quarterly dip in nearly two years, and the latter pointing to an 11.8 percent decline.

But neither painted a rosy picture for the year, with Gartner figuring PCs to tumble 4.4 percent and IDC forecasting an 8.7 percent slide. Moreover, IDC believes PC shipments won’t stop sliding until 2017, when the segment will have recorded five straight years of shipment losses.

If IDC doesn’t think Skylake and Windows 10 will bring PCs into positive territory for another two years, Krzanich must believe, then, that Skylake will rescue the PC market, at least to a degree, from its extended doldrums. But will it?

If there is a PC shipment silver bullet, it may be closer to the the combined effect of Skylake and Windows 10, according to Kirk Skaugen, Intel’s Client Computing Group general manager.

“This is something that only happens once every decade or so,” Skaugen told the Verge at the recent IFA show in Berlin, referring to the favorable timing of Windows 10’s release and Skylake shorter thereafter.

Skaugen told the Verge that it’s no accident that the two complementary platforms came to market at the same time–Intel and Microsoft collaborated on the Skylake architecture over a four-year period, he said. When you consider that Microsoft wants Windows 10 on every PC and mobile device in the world, and Intel wants Skylake to power everything and anything that runs on a chip, Skaugen’s account makes perfect sense.

While it won’t take that long to determine the market impact of Skylake and Windows 10, it may take the next few quarters to learn if their synergy resuscitates the PC market.