Intel Core i7 5960X CPU Core Scaling Under Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Processors on 14 September 2014 at 11:00 AM EDT. Page 1 of 3. 8 Comments.

With the Intel Core i7 5960X Haswell-E is an eight-core processor with Hyper Threading to yield sixteen logical threads, we're seeing how well this extreme Haswell processor really scales with modern open-source workloads as we benchmark the i7-5960X under Ubuntu Linux and see how the benchmarks scale with varying core counts.

The Gigabyte X99-UD4-CF motherboard used for the benchmarking allows manipulating the number of cores enabled through the UEFI setup utility and it also allows toggling the Hyper Threading state. With this we were able to enable one through eight cores and then also toggle Hyper Threading to test all core configurations for Intel's latest $1000+ high-end Core i7 processor.

On the software side was a daily snapshot of Ubuntu 14.10 with manually upgrading to the Linux 3.17 kernel. GCC 4.9.1 is the stock compiler and all of the benchmarks used in this article were compiled from source.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite we ran the test profiles that were multi-threading friendly on Linux either through OpenMP or other parallel programming implementations. With each test it was run at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 physical cores plus the final run at eight cores plus Hyper Threading (16 threads; the stock setup of the CPU). Along with the raw results that were processed by the Phoronix Test Suite, OpenBenchmarking.org also took care of normalizing the data too for seeing exactly how efficient the software is scaling.


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