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.

Comments

Re:Meh.

[Junta]

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.