Worth waiting for Sky Lake "6th gen" mobile processors?

Electric-Mayhem

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So, I recently had my truck broken into during a trip for work. Unfortunately they got my laptop and I've been looking at replacements ever since. I've pretty much decided on a MSI GS70 Stealth Pro. They seem to keep it relatively up to date and have them with 5th gen I7's now, but I know Skylake/6th gen mobile (U series) processors are very close on the horizon. I'm sure there will be some improvements, but my questions is it going to be worth waiting for them over a 5th gen?

The GS70 is a pretty stout (yet thin and relatively light) gaming notebook, so its gonna be a battery hog. Still, any efficiency upgrades would be welcome for sure. Just curious what people think on this one.
 
If you can wait, then power efficiency (i.e. laptop use) is pretty much the ultimate reason to wait for the next upcoming processor generation at any given time (but not wait after that, because then you'll be waiting forever).

There's no information available about the concrete efficiency gains coming with Skylake laptop versions. With Haswell the efficiency gain was huge (in the order of 6 hours becoming 9 hours of battery life in a MacBook Air). With Broadwell the difference wasn't so huge but then Broadwell was a dud in most other respects too.

By waiting, you'll also chance a more power efficient GPU and better iGPU/GPU swapping tech, which should net you better battery life.

I doubt a gaming laptop like that is going to be based on a U-series processor, though. Those are pretty slow and mainly for ultrabooks and executive laptops. A gaming laptop is likely to have a H(Q)-series CPU which consumes a lot more power but is also much faster.

Taking your situation into account, personally I wouldn't wait. With back to school offers and the end-of-cycle pricing on Haswell laptops it should be pretty easy to get a very nice deal on a Haswell i7 + GTX 960M/970M/980M laptop. It just won't have a great battery life, 2-4 hours depending on manufacturer.
 
Thanks for your input. I'm sort of coming to the same conclusion too. I doubt they'll release a PC on the first day of Skylake mobile lineup being replaced, especially if they'll wait for a new GPU set. I think the GTX 900m series still has a decent run ahead of it though, so I forsee a version of this lappy with a skylake processor and the GTX 970m as pretty likely. Honestly, it'll probably take AMD actually catching up for them to really want to bring out a new mobile GPU generation.

So the next question is I'm trying to decide between one with a 4th gen but it has two M.2 SSD's in Raid 0 or one with a 5th gen that has a higher clock speed but just a single SSD. Both have a seperate 1TB hard drive as well and are otherwise identical. Here is the comparison...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Productcompare.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100025325%2050001312%20600003982%20600562217%20600551646%20600372105%20600494854&IsNodeId=1&srchInDesc=stealth&Manufactory=1312&bop=And&CompareItemList=3365%7C34-152-812%5E34-152-812%2C34-152-653%5E34-152-653&percm=34-152-813%3A%24%24%24%24%24%24%24%3B34-152-812%3A%24%24%24%24%24%24%24%3B34-152-653%3A%24%24%24%24%24%24%24

The one with the Haswell in it is significantly cheaper and the already set up RAID system is pretty cool. As far as I know, you can buy another M.2 and do the RAID thing for the one with the Broadwell chip, but its already $300 more expensive plus the cost of the extra drive. I think there are actually 3 M.2 slots on the thing, so you could do a 3 drive RAID system even.
 
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