The Intel 6th Gen Skylake Review: Core i7-6700K and i5-6600K Tested
by Ian Cutress on August 5, 2015 8:00 AM ESTGenerational Tests on the i7-6700K: Legacy, Office and Web Benchmarks
Moving on to the generational tests, and similar to our last Broadwell review I want to dedicate a few pages to specifically looking at how stock speed processors perform as Intel has released each generation. For this each CPU is left at stock, DRAM set to DDR3-1600 (or DDR4-2133 for Skylake in DDR4 mode) and we run the full line of CPU tests at our disposal.
Legacy
Some users will notice that in our benchmark database Bench, we keep data on the CPUs we’ve tested back over a decade and the benchmarks we were running back then. For a few of these benchmarks, such as Cinebench R10, we do actually run these on the new CPUs as well, although for the sake of brevity and relevance we tend not to put this data in the review. Well here are a few of those numbers too.
Even with the older tests that might not include any new instruction sets, the Skylake CPUs sit on top of the stack.
Office 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.
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.
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 totalling 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.
3D Particle Movement
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.
FastStone Image Viewer 4.9
FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and results are given in seconds.
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. For our web benchmarks, we take four well known tests with Chrome 35 as a consistent browser.
Sunspider 1.0.2
Mozilla Kraken 1.1
WebXPRT
Google Octane v2
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SuperVeloce - Saturday, August 8, 2015 - link
Wait, what? Skylake and 2011-3 in the same sentence? Who, for the love of god, would say such a thing? Power delivery is (again) new and very different from Haswell/Broadwell, so there is no chance to reuse 1150 and 2011-3Oxford Guy - Saturday, August 8, 2015 - link
The belief put forward was that Broadwell would be compatible with Haswell desktop motherboards and Skylake would be compatible with Haswell-E motherboards.KAlmquist - Saturday, August 8, 2015 - link
The analysis by Puget Sound Systems offers a plausible explanation of why Skylake has a higher TDP than Haswell or Ivy Bridge: the integrated GPU that comes with Skylake is faster and draws more power. It appears that if you don't use the integrated GPU, Skylake draws slightly less power than Haswell.SuperVeloce - Saturday, August 8, 2015 - link
That's definitely plausible. The other thing here is the TDP 4790K uses. 88W is too conservative for the clocks and voltages from that chip. They needed to up that I am sure.bobbozzo - Saturday, August 8, 2015 - link
Error in graph on final page:"Gains over Sandy Bridge.png" - the key for green says IVY bridge.
tuklap - Saturday, August 8, 2015 - link
I don't know... Intel seems to keep pushing forwards every year with profit in mind. The thing that they are really making breakthrough is the non volatile, high bandwidth memory or Xpoint...If Xpoint will be available maybe this will give a new speed bump... But Sandy-Skylake is really good...
wizyy - Saturday, August 8, 2015 - link
There is a review which shows 6600k to be quite a nice improvement over popular I5 processors in 10 recent games, over at eurogamer.net. Check it if you're a gamer thinking to upgrade your older I5.SilverManSachs - Saturday, August 8, 2015 - link
There is a good jump in IPC for the Core i5, less so for the Core i7. This makes sense as its harder to push the top end performance higher at smaller nodes but they did improve the i5 performance which is great as i5's are the most sold parts. Also, good overclocking room on the i7.Would be very interested to see 'Skylake vs Excavator' CPU only benchmarks on the mobile 17W parts. Please so that test for us AT!
soldier45 - Sunday, August 9, 2015 - link
Spending $500+ on Skylake over my 2600k to get 3-5 fps in my games isn't really worth it. Having said that at the end of the day,I'm about to spend $700 on a 980Ti over a 780 classified so yeh I will end up going with Skylake.asmian - Sunday, August 9, 2015 - link
The interesting fact for me faced with building a new rig is how the i7-6700K compares with the 28-lane Haswell-E i7-5820K. For my usage (design/programming, no interest in SLI/Crossfire, regular Handbrake use), with very comparable mid-range boards (ASRock Z170 Extreme6+ versus ASRock X99 Extreme4 with the USB 3.1 A/C card) the price of mobo + board is almost identical at £490 or so in the UK right now - in fact, the Haswell-E combo would be £15 cheaper. All other added components (DDR4 memory, new OS, M2 SSD etc.) would be identical.So do the extra 2 cores at a somewhat lower eventual overclock for that Handbrake usage make up for extremely marginal extra IPC on 4 cores at a higher price (and trading a few extra features for many less SATA ports)? Somehow I doubt it... The only question remaining would be whether waiting another year or more for Skylake-E would be worth it for even more chipset features over X99, but that looks rather marginal as well.