Linux Power Efficiency Of Skylake, Broadwell, Haswell & Kaveri Compared

Last week from the new Intel Core i5 6600K "Skylake" processor I posted the initial Linux CPU benchmarks as well as results for the new HD Graphics 530 graphics processor with Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver stack. In this article are some complementary data points for this Core i5 Skylake CPU compared to Haswell and Broadwell processors as well as a AMD A10-7870K Godavari APU.

The previous articles featured a greater selection of APUs/CPUs while this article is primarily focused on putting out some performance-per-Watt / power efficiency results for the Intel CPUs and AMD APU reference point. All of the testing was done still on Fedora 22 with the Linux 4.2 Git kernel with X.Org Server 1.17.2, Mesa 10.6.3, and GCC 5.1.1.

The comparison systems were based on the AMD A10-7870K, Intel Core i7 4770K Haswell, Intel Core i7 5775C Broadwell, and the Intel Core i5 6600K Skylake. Unfortunately I don't yet have a Intel Core i7 6700K Skylake CPU for testing so for right now it's limited to that ~$250 CPU for benchmarking. The i5-6600K has a 91 Watt TDP while the i7-4770K has a 84 Watt TDP and the i7-5775C has a 65 Watt TDP.

Other tests still in the works for my initial Skylake Linux roundabout include some compiler benchmarks, seeing how the HD Graphics 530 compare to some discrete GPUs on the same system when using Mesa 11.0 + Linux 4.2~4.3, and whatever other suggestions come up by Phoronix Premium subscribers. All the CPU/GPU tests run in this article were done via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. The AC system power consumption was measured using a USB WattsUp power meter.