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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.
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.