The Intel 6th Gen Skylake Review: Core i7-6700K and i5-6600K Tested
by Ian Cutress on August 5, 2015 8:00 AM ESTWhat You Can Buy: Linux Performance
Built around several freely available benchmarks for Linux, Linux-Bench is a project spearheaded by Patrick at ServeTheHome to streamline about a dozen of these tests in a single neat package run via a set of three commands using an Ubuntu 11.04 LiveCD. These tests include fluid dynamics used by NASA, ray-tracing, OpenSSL, molecular modeling, and a scalable data structure server for web deployments. We run Linux-Bench and have chosen to report a select few of the tests that rely on CPU and DRAM speed.
C-Ray: link
C-Ray is a simple ray-tracing program that focuses almost exclusively on processor performance rather than DRAM access. The test in Linux-Bench renders a heavy complex scene offering a large scalable scenario.
NAMD, Scalable Molecular Dynamics: link
Developed by the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NAMD is a set of parallel molecular dynamics codes for extreme parallelization up to and beyond 200,000 cores. The reference paper detailing NAMD has over 4000 citations, and our testing runs a small simulation where the calculation steps per unit time is the output vector.
NPB, Fluid Dynamics: link
Aside from LINPACK, there are many other ways to benchmark supercomputers in terms of how effective they are for various types of mathematical processes. The NAS Parallel Benchmarks (NPB) are a set of small programs originally designed for NASA to test their supercomputers in terms of fluid dynamics simulations, useful for airflow reactions and design.
Redis: link
Many of the online applications rely on key-value caches and data structure servers to operate. Redis is an open-source, scalable web technology with a b developer base, but also relies heavily on memory bandwidth as well as CPU performance.
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semyon95 - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
DDR4 is completely useless and it will stay useless for a whileVlad_Da_Great - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
DDR4 should be replaced with 3XP. The new memory from INTC/MU JV. Intel has foreseen that and perhaps next year CPUs models will have huge leap in performance.boeush - Thursday, August 6, 2015 - link
3dXP is much faster than NAND, but still nowhere near as fast as DRAM. So it will never replace DDR.boeush - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
DDR4 is useless at 2133. It won't be quite as useless once 4000+ becomes the affordable norm. It'll take a year or two, but come 2017-18, DDR3 will be a clear-cut dinosaur. Of course, by then HBM 2 and maybe even 3 might be a compelling alternative - if not an upgradeable one...jjj - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Great , now cut the GPU and sell it at 60-80$ and it's all good.Until then, this is one of the biggest ripoffs in tech.
They do this instead of making a 60mm2 chip (without a GPU) that would cost them 10-20$ depending on yields and could easily retail well bellow 100$ even with their obscene margins. They just add bloat, in fact most of the chip is bloat, just to make it look like you are getting something worth paying for.
richardginn - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Why cut 80 bucks off it??? The broadwell i7-5775c CPU has GT3e graphics on it and would destroy the crap out of this Skylake CPU for Integrated graphics performance.Skylake is a full on total flop right now!!
Bambooz - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Except noone gives two sh*ts about integrated graphics when buying an i7..8steve8 - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
I doTeknobug - Wednesday, August 5, 2015 - link
Unless it's in a mini PC type thing like the Gigabyte BRIX or Alienware Alpha. But no I don't buy i7's for its integrated GPU, just gonna say that high end CPU's shouldn't even include iGPU.nikaldro - Tuesday, August 11, 2015 - link
Still, the L4 cache can be useful, and DX12 could make use of both the GPU and iGPU to give better results.I mean, you're charging us 350 bucks, and I want the absolute cutting edge for that much, considering that by next year its 6 core counterpart will cost just a bit more, I think I'll just wait for the skylake E parts