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 ESTReal World Performance
The dynamics of CPU Turbo modes, both Intel and AMD, can cause concern during environments with a variable threaded workload. There is also an added issue of the motherboard remaining consistent, depending on how the motherboard manufacturer wants to add in their own boosting technologies over the ones that Intel would prefer they used. In order to remain consistent, we implement an OS-level unique high performance mode on all the CPUs we test which should override any motherboard manufacturer performance mode.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Dolphin Benchmark: link
Many emulators are often bound by single thread CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant boost to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that raytraces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in minutes, where the Wii itself scores 17.53 minutes.
Skylake saw a good boost with our Dolphin benchmark, and it remains a single-thread driven event. The 100 MHz difference between the i3-6320 and i3-6300 amounts to just over a second difference, but one step back to the i3-6100 is another 42 seconds. This is one of the few instances where the 3 MB of L3 cache on the i3-6100 makes a significant difference. The i5-6600 sits in the middle of our i3 parts due to its lower CPU frequency but higher cache.
WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
WinRAR is a variable thread test, so the CPUs with more threads all pull ahead of the i3 parts. Again, we see a crescendo from the i3-6320 to the i3-6300 and the i3-6100, with the i3-6100 being slightly further out due to its reduced L3.
3D Particle Movement v2
The second version of this benchmark is similar to the first, however it has been re-written in VS2012 with one major difference: the code has been written to address the issue of false sharing. If data required by multiple threads, say four, is in the same cache line, the software cannot read the cache line once and split the data to each thread - instead it will read four times in a serial fashion. The new software splits the data to new cache lines so reads can be parallelized and stalls minimized. As v2 is fairly new, we are still gathering data and results are currently limited.
The updated 3DPM benchmark likes good cache management and a high frequency with lots of threads. As from our Carrizo review, the AMD X4 845 does really well here, beating the i3-6100TE which has a much lower frequency. For the i3 parts, we see a regular staircase between the three, outpacing the much older FX-6350.
Web Benchmarks
On the lower end processors, general usability is a big factor of experience, especially as we move into the HTML5 era of web browsing.
Mozilla Kraken
Kraken also enjoys Skylake CPUs, with a preference for high frqeuency parts as well. The regular staircase is in effect between the three, showing how L3 cache makes little difference here.
Google Octane v2
Octane has a similar performance to Kraken, with the Skylake CPUs out in top with the staircase results. The i5-6600 sits in the middle, despite having four physical cores, but restrained to four threads. Because of this and our regular staircase, we can see that the L3 cache plays little role here and the threads are very lightweight. The resources on the FX CPUs unfortunately do not do well here.
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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.