This study provides an in-depth analysis of the electromagnetic comparative assessment of the unskewed and skewed rotors for a 1 kW, three-phase, inner-rotor permanent magnet synchronous generator intended for small-scale direct-drive wind power applications. The generator has 36 stator slots and 12 rotor poles, with a 220 mm outer diameter of the stator and a stack length of 60 mm. The unskewed generator uses a ring magnet rotor design and features a gap size of 2.0 mm, while the skewed rotor design uses a block magnet rotor with a linear step of 10 degrees in three stages, with the air gap size of 1.5 mm. Performance criteria used for the finite-element-based simulations using Altair FluxMotor include the following: cogging torque, back-EMF waveform quality, losses, torque ripple, voltage, and efficiency, combined with thermal analysis. The reduction of the peak-to-peak cogging torque of the skewed rotor reaches 84.5phase back-EMF decreases by 67requirements of IEEE 519 regarding harmonics. Both the unskewed and skewed rotors show comparable efficiency at the same operating point (19 N·m and 500 rpm): 95.34full-load efficiency of the unskewed rotor (92.87the corresponding efficiency of the skewed rotor (91.96.