The Skylake Core i3 (51W) CPU Review: i3-6320, i3-6300 and i3-6100 Tested
by Ian Cutress on August 8, 2016 9:00 AM ESTLegacy Benchmarks
Some of our legacy benchmarks have followed AnandTech for over a decade, showing how performance changes when the code bases stay the same in that period. Some of this software is still in common use today.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
3D Particle Movement v1
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. This is the original version, written in the style of a typical non-computer science student coding up an algorithm for their theoretical problem, and comes without any non-obvious optimizations not already performed by the compiler, such as false sharing.
With un-trained programming skills comes a myriad of results. 3DPMv1 is not cache bound, but highly affected by false sharing and IPC. Our Core i3 staircase is in effect, and AMD is badly affected requiring 8 threads to match/beat an i3. In our v2 results, the spread is a more believable, which goes to show that having the right programming paradigm (even just a couple of lines of code) can make a large difference.
CineBench 11.5 and 10
Cinebench is a widely known benchmarking tool for measuring performance relative to MAXON's animation software Cinema 4D. Cinebench has been optimized over a decade and focuses on purely CPU horsepower, meaning if there is a discrepancy in pure throughput characteristics, Cinebench is likely to show that discrepancy. Arguably other software doesn't make use of all the tools available, so the real world relevance might purely be academic, but given our large database of data for Cinebench it seems difficult to ignore a small five minute test. We run the modern version 15 in this test, as well as the older 11.5 and 10 due to our back data.
The older CB results mirror the CB15 test, albeit more compressed.
POV-Ray 3.7
POV-Ray is a common ray-tracing tool used to generate realistic looking scenes. We've used POV-Ray in its various guises over the years as a good benchmark for performance, as well as a tool on the march to ray-tracing limited immersive environments. We use the built-in multithreaded benchmark.
AMD gets a better showing in POV-Ray, with the $70 X4 845 going ahead of all of our Core i3 parts, and the older A10 sitting in between them. The older FX parts, despite their age, take advantage of the multi-threaded nature of the benchmark.
TrueCrypt 7.1
Before its discontinuation, TrueCrypt was a popular tool for WindowsXP to offer software encryption to a file system. The almost latest version, 7.1, is still widely used however the developers have stopped supporting it since the introduction of encrypted disk support in Windows 8/7/Vista from 5/2014, and as such any new security issues are unfixed.
x264 HD 3.0
Similarly, the x264 HD 3.0 package we use here is also kept for historic regressional data. The latest version is 5.0.1, and encodes a 1080p video clip into a high quality x264 file. Version 3.0 only performs the same test on a 720p file, and in most circumstances the software performance hits its limit on high end processors, but still works well for mainstream and low-end. Also, this version only takes a few minutes, whereas the latest can take over 90 minutes to run.
7-zip
7-Zip is a freeware compression/decompression tool that is widely deployed across the world. We run the included benchmark tool using a 50MB library and take the average of a set of fixed-time results.
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Ratman6161 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
I don't understand your point. Did you note how many of the tests where the i3's (sometimes just the 6320 and sometimes all of them) beat the i5? Also look at certain gaming tests where an i3 with a better graphics card beats an i5 with a lesser graphics card...i.e. if you save $100 on the CPU and put that towords the graphics instead, you sometimes come out ahead overall.Finally, I know plenty of people who are just using their PC for web surfing, email, MS Office, etc where they would not notice any difference between an i3-6100 and an i5-6600K other than the fact that it cost almost $100 more. Sometimes good enough is good enough and thats where the i3 comes in.
extide - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Yeah, the i3's sometimes beat the i5's because when moving from the top end i3 to the bottom end i5 you lose quite a bit of frequency, but you gain two physical cores. So, if something is very lightly threaded then it may perform better on the i3.beginner99 - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
True but for the mentioned usage you can step down to a Pentium or even Celeron and save even more and not notice much of a difference.BillBear - Sunday, August 14, 2016 - link
I agree. If Android can manage to leverage many small ARM cores for common tasks like web browsing, there is no excuse for Microsoft not being able to manage the same feat on Windows.http://www.anandtech.com/show/9518/the-mobile-cpu-...
xenol - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Please, do more lower-end CPU reviews! This data helps me understand how software and hardware play together more and more.To those thinking that it's sad that performance hasn't really increased in the past few years, maybe this is more of a sign that games are becoming efficient. If anything, this means your hardware will go a lot longer than before. Think about it, if the i5-2500K is still a viable CPU, think about how long an i5-6600K will last.
Philotech - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
I'd love to see the same comparison for the mobile variants of the i3/i5 chips, in particular the 15W variants suitable for ultrabooks and MacBook Pros.Looks like for desktops, as a mainstream user there is no need to look beyond the i3. How about mobile? Looking at Intel's ARK database, there aren't that many 15w i3s (one, actually, 6100U), but a few i5s (four).
dave_the_nerd - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
That seems tough - since they're soldering into the chassis, and different cooling can result in throttling and very different performance numbers even from the same chips. It'd be really hard to make a fair CPU-to-CPU comparison.Philotech - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Hm, you're right probably. Seeing how small the differences between the desktop i3s and i5 is, I'm wondering if it makes any sense at all to judge a laptop or ultrabook by its CPU, in particular taking into account your point, i.e. that probably cooling (and selecting a higher or lower TDP by the manufacturer) makes much more of a difference than the CPU model.extide - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Well, in the mobile chips the segmentation is different. In the desktop world going from i3 to i5 you gain two cores, lose hyper threading, and gain turbo boost.In the mobile chips everything has hyper threading. Going from i3 to i5 gains you turbo boost on a mobile chip and that can be pretty significant, because on those really low TDP chips they tend to have a pretty low base speed but the ones that can boost can usually boost up quite a bit. Going to an i7 in the 15w chips add's a bit more clockspeed and you will typically move from 3MB of L3 to 4MB of L3. The best value are the i5's in the mobile world because turbo boost helps a lot, but moving to an i7 with 4MB of L3 doesnt really gain that much performance, and can be pretty costly.
So, you can't really use these results to judge the differences between mobile i3's and i5's because they are quite different.
slickr - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
I'm waiting for AMD's Zen CPU's before I upgrade my CPU. I'm running an older I5 3330, but so far nothing is really significantly faster for the same price I bought it at the time(180 euros). Especially in games the difference seems negligible and mostly comes down to GPU.So I'm waiting on Zen as my next likely upgrade.