Intel's Core i5 6500 Shines As a $199 Skylake Processor, Works With Linux (phoronix.com)

Posted by timothy on Thursday October 15, 2015 @06:06AM from the there's-the-rub dept.

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.

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Meh. by Moof123 · 2015-10-15 06:26 · Score: 4, Interesting

Moore's law is dead. Core count is stagnant. All recent gains seem to be in incremental power savings.
In this particular case the 6500 is a fixed 3.2 GHz, while the 6600K is 3.5 GHz as shipped. The 6600K can readily be pushed to 4.2 GHz on air, which is partly why you pay the extra K tax to be able to pull those shenanigans, and you get to leave the cheaper part in th edust.