Intel Core i5 6500: A Great Skylake CPU For $200, Works Well On Linux

First up are some scientific application tests.

With Rodinia, the Core i5 6500 came out ahead of the similarly-priced AMD FX-8370 and was a leap ahead of the Core i5 4670 mid-range Haswell CPU. The i5-6500 did run behind the i7-4790K, i5-6600K, and i7-5775C in this test given that Rodinia makes heavy usage of OpenMP for exploiting all available CPU cores and craves high frequencies.

With the FFTE benchmark, the Core i5 6500 was only beat out by its i5 6600K sibling! The Core i5 6500 beat out both the i7 4790K and i7 5775C for this built-from-source test.

With the Himeno pressure solver, the i5-6500 was a tiny bit faster than the Core i7 4790K.