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Intel's Core i5 6500 Shines As a $199 Skylake Processor, Works With Linux (phoronix.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Intel has begun releasing more "Skylake" processors that are cheaper than the launch SKUs of the i5-6600K and i7-6700K. One of the new processors that is now widely available is the Core i5 6500 and it costs just $199 USD — that puts it just a few dollars more than the AMD FX-8370 and significantly less than the higher-end Skylake and Haswell CPUs. At least with Ubuntu Linux, the Core i5 6500 is showing competitive performance that for some workloads puts it faster than Core i7 Haswell/Broadwell processors and much faster than any AMD processors. The Intel Skylake CPUs are fully supported under Linux but the caveat is needing the very latest kernel otherwise there's no graphics acceleration or sound support.
Yeah, that's the interesting thing. If you just follow the desktop parts, performance has been modestly improving and power consumption is dipping. Meanwhile on the server side, power consumption has been more steady and the core count has been going drastically up. Sure workloads that don't scale to many cores aren't getting that much of a boost (and that is the state of most desktop platforms), but areas with multithreaded workload and/or consolidated bunch of single threaded workload have continued to benefit from advances.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The compatibility question is not over the CPU, but over the GPU. While Intel doesn't really market it well, this chip comes with an integrated GPU that's faster than most of AMD's APU GPUs, while the CPU is about twice as fast as any of AMD's APUs.
It depends on what you're doing...
I have a i7-920 on the test bench, it is still plenty fast for most anything you'd do with your average desktop computer, but the newer chips are indeed faster.
For example, comparing the i7-920 against the i3-6320, you'll find the 2.66 GHz i7 actually slower in some tasks than the modern i3 chip.
The i3 runs at 3.9 GHz, this is more than 45% faster, and it doesn't even including the IPC improvements across that many generations.
Now, on some very specific tasks, the old i7 might be faster thanks to its triple channel memory and its 4 true cores and 8 threads.
But those situations are very specific. The dual core, quad thread i3 is enough for a lot of things and even for those where it isn't, the faster clock speed combined with the higher IPC makes up a lot of the difference.