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

Posted by timothy on 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.

8 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Meh. by Moof123 · · 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.

    1. Re:Meh. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Guess what? Until AMD steps up and delivers a killer product at a killer price you will see nothing but stagnation from Intel.

    2. Re:Meh. by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Moore's law is dead. Core count is stagnant. All recent gains seem to be in incremental power savings.

      You discard the improvements in power savings like they are nothing.

      Today you can get the same performance as 5 years ago, for 1/3 the power consumption.

      That is a massive improvement. Moore's Law isn't dead, instead of more performance, Intel has focused on using less power to provide the same, or slightly better performance. Give these new chips 130w to play with and they'll blow away the older stuff. But what took 130w 5 years ago now only takes 45w.

      That is a big deal.

    3. Re:Meh. by Junta · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

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    4. Re:Meh. by Blaskowicz · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You are fairly wrong here, Intel has had the 4790K which is 4GHz base and 4.4GHz turbo clock, it is slightly more power hungry than the 3.x ones. 6700K is more of the same.
      Or get a Pentium 3258 on H81 motherboard and set the clock at 4.4GHz, use its integrated video on linux. It's a dog bone they threw at us.

  2. Re:It would be a news story if it DIDN'T work by beelsebob · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  3. Who is buying the FX-8370? by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That hasn't been the sweet spot for the FX chips in like...well ever.

    Us that buy AMD chips are not buying the FX-8370, the bang for the buck just isn't there, if you want an octocore the sweet spot is the FX-8320, either the FX-8320 or the FX-8320E if you want to lower the power a tad, which is what I personally went for. The really hot spot right now is the FX-6300 which is a great gaming chip. A 3.5Ghz/4.1Ghz turbo chip with 6 cores for $99? Its a kick ass buy at that price.

    As for the 6500? Its a good chip, although I don't know why they are calling them "Linux friendly" when its Intel that have been coming up with all the nasty DRM chips going all the way back to HDCP and Palladium, but strictly based on the CPU? Its a good chip. I just have to wonder how many chips both Intel and AMD are gonna move when a 7 year old C2Q or Phenom II has no problem running pretty much every piece of software out there including games, both companies have built such badass chips for years that most users have piles of cycles left over.

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  4. Re:I wish they had some reference power testing by FlyHelicopters · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.