Intel Core i5 6500 Is Looking Like A Nice $200 Skylake Processor

The Core i5 6500 is an Intel Skylake CPU that's priced at $199 USD and has begun hitting retail channels. I ended up buying one for Linux benchmarking and have out my initial full Linux comparison and review tomorrow while in the article today are some early performance metrics.

This Core i5 6500 is a quad-core part without Hyper Threading and has a 3.2GHz clock speed with 3.6GHz Turbo frequency. The CPU has a 65 Watt TDP and boasts Intel HD Graphics 530 with a maximum frequency there of 1.05GHz. The rest of the specs are similar to the other Skylake CPUs, like the previously reviewed Core i5 6600K.

If you're curious about the i5-6500's /proc/cpuinfo, you can find some sample system logs hosted on OpenBenchmarking.org.

While waiting for the full article, if you're anxious to see how the Core i5 6500 would compare to your own system on Linux, I uploaded some standalone results using the Phoronix Test Suite. You can see those standalone results via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. If you want to compare your own system's performance to these numbers, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and then run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1510147-HA-COREI565001. Again, many more results tomorrow, including the HD Graphics 530 Linux results for this little brother to the i5-6600K.

By tomorrow I should be complete with my initial run-through of tests atop Ubuntu Linux for the Core i5 6500 compared to other Skylake, Broadwell, and Haswell CPUs. There's also a few older CPUs like the i5-2500K Sandy Bridge and then of course AMD CPUs and APUs too. Tomorrow's article should be very interesting in our first look at this sub-$200 CPU. I bought the processor when not finding many i5-6500 tests even under Windows, while knowing the price is appealing to more Phoronix readers than the more expensive Skylake parts. If you appreciate the Linux hardware reviews and benchmarks done here at Phoronix, please consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium.

If you're interested in buying the Core i5 6500 as a sub-$200 Skylake CPU even before seeing tomorrow's Linux benchmark results, you can find it in stock at Amazon.com. I had bought it last week at $203 while since then it's went up a few dollars, but is Prime and comes with free shipping.

UPDATE: You can see the Linux review via Intel Core i5 6500: A Great Skylake CPU For $200, Works Well On Linux.