It would be rather funny situation if Broadwell was to end up faster than Skylake in game benchmarks with dGPU due to eDRAM XD. It has around 15-20% advantage there VS Haswell and I seriously doubt Skylake can make such a jump without that massive cache onboard. Let's wait and see.
It will be very close it seems. Pretty much a wash as you say with one being faster here and the other there. Will be interesting to see how it pans out.
You know guys, I seriously think Intel just f* up big this time.
I mean that i5 is on par with a much faster Haswell chip, it has much better graphics than an equal EUs count only for the bandwidth... and we are not going to see L4 in mainstream Skylake?
How big would a 128/64MB, 14nm eDRAM be? Some 40 to 20mm2 and it could easily improve BOTH the CPU and GPU.
Plus they wouldn't even need to make the die bigger to include it: just cut the IGP some 20/30% and get back that performance with the cache alone, while probably having same power consumption, one die only and a handy L4!
I'm not an engineer (still) but something fishy: either that's lack of competition right there or just complacency.
I can just hope current Xeons with eDRAM are such a huge succes that they implement it on all the line and mainstream part as consequence, still it's a sad looking affair from a desktop user perspective.