Intel Core i5 6600K Skylake Linux CPU Benchmarks

Written by Michael Larabel in Processors on 23 August 2015 at 01:10 PM EDT. Page 1 of 4. 31 Comments.

Earlier this week I began my Intel Skylake Linux benchmarking by posting some initial results from the HD Graphics 530, the new Intel "Gen9" graphics. While more Intel Linux HD Graphics 530 results are on the way, completed for this weekend are the initial CPU benchmark results comparing the Core i5 6600K to various other Intel Haswell/Broadwell processors as well as some AMD APUs and CPUs.

This article is offering a first glimpse at the Core i5 6600K performance under Linux. All the tests in this article were done from Fedora 22 x86_64 with all available stable release updates plus the Linux 4.2 Git kernel from the Rawhide NoDebug kernel repository. The results are just looking at the CPU performance today and all of the tests were built from source using Fedora 22's GCC 5.1.1 compiler. Most of the tests honored the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS of "-O3 -march=native" as indicated on the graphs on the following pages.

The Intel Core i5 6600K Skylake processor is quad-core (no Hyper Threading) and offers a base frequency of 3.5GHz with a turbo frequency of 3.9GHz. The i5-6600K has a 91 Watt TDP, 6MB of cache, AVX 2.0 support, and supports up to DDR4-2133MHz memory. The HD Graphics 530 specifications are outlined in my earlier graphics article.

For this initial Core i5 6600K Linux benchmarking the performance on the Intel side was compared to a Core i7 4770K Haswell, Core i7 4790K Haswell, and Core i7 5775C Broadwell. The AMD systems tested for this comparison were the A10-7850K Kaveri and A10-7870K Godavari APUs plus the FX-8320E and FX-8370 CPUs.

This article is just offering a range of CPU benchmarks across all of these systems as orchestrated in a fully-automated and comparable manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. In a follow-up article will be the power consumption / performance-per-Watt metrics. I'm still catching up in my Skylake Linux testing due to not receiving a review sample in advance from Intel but having resorted to buying a retail i5-6600K unit while waiting for sample availability to improve; I'm hopeful Intel will soon send over a Core i7 6700K for delivering complementary tests of that Skylake processor on Linux. If you appreciate all of the Linux hardware testing done at Phoronix, please consider supporting the cause by subscribing to Phoronix Premium or making a PayPal tip.

Now let's go see how this Core i5 Skylake compares to Haswell/Broadwell and AMD's offerings.


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