Intel Core i7 8086K Linux Performance

Here is a look at the overall CPU temperatures over the course of the dozens of benchmarks run via the Phoronix Test Suite and captured in a fully-automated and comparable manner. As a reminder, the AMD Ryzen CPUs were using their included stock Wraith heatsinks while the Intel CPUs were tested with an Arctic Freezer i11 since Intel does not bundle reference heatsinks with these high-end processors. The Core i7 8086K when overclocked was understandably the hottest and peaked at 92 Celsius under the most demanding scenarios, but most of the time was hovering in the mid-50s, roughly on the average of the Ryzen 7 2700X. The Core i7 8086K running at stock speeds ended up being slightly cooler than the Core i7 8700K.

Lastly is a look at the overall AC system power consumption over all of the benchmarks ran thus far. The Core i7 8086K system with RX Vega 64 and Z370 motherboard and 16GB of RAM had an average AC power draw of 137 Watts, but when all cores were overclocked to 5.0GHz, that rose to a 180 Watt average. The peak during the testing was 437 Watts. That isn't too much higher though than the Ryzen 7 2700X that had an average power draw of 169 Watts and a peak of 413 Watts and much better than what was seen with the older Ryzen 7 1800X.

If you are looking to spend over $400 USD on a desktop processor, the Core i7 8086K offers a lot of potential with hitting the 5.0GHz mark out-of-the-box for its single-core turbo frequency. But it's really more advantageous if easily overclocking this unlocked processor to 5.0GHz on all six cores to make the investment more worthwhile. As shown by these initial Linux benchmarks, the Core i7 8086K runs very well under Linux and does very well in a majority of the workloads except for the highly threaded workloads where the eight cores / sixteen threads of the Ryzen 7 series line-up is able to come out ahead. But obviously in the single-threaded workloads or those applications not scaling as well, the Intel Coffeelake CPUs are superior.

With the current generation of Linux OpenGL/Vulkan games, the Intel Core i7 CPUs were noticeably faster than the AMD Ryzen 2700 series at 1080p while obviously if you are gaming at 4K or in the more demanding scenarios, those numbers will be much tighter.

The price of the Core i7 8086K is steep at $425 USD -- an increase of over $100 compared to the Ryzen 7 2700X -- especially with no heatsink being bundled, but if the price isn't a deterrent, this limited edition processor offers a lot of potential right now. It will certainly be interesting to see though how the landscape looks in the months ahead with the rumored Core i7 eight-core Coffeelake models, etc.

When it came to outright wins and losses from the main set of benchmark results in this article, the Core i7 8086K when overclocked to 5.0GHz on all cores came in first in more than half of the benchmarks against the Ryzen 7 2700X and other CPUs. When comparing just the results at stock speeds across the CPUs, the Core i7 8086K still won 57% of the time, the Core i7 8700K finished first 19% of the time, and the Ryzen 7 2700X came in first 13% of the time, based upon all of the benchmarking data within the main OpenBenchmarking.org result file.

Thanks again to Intel for supplying the i7-8086K processor for being able to provide Linux benchmarks. Additional Linux/BSD performance tests using the Core i7 8086K 5GHz CPU will be featured in Phoronix in some other interesting comparisons in the days ahead.

If you wish to see how your own Linux system(s) compare to the CPU performance of the Core i7 8086K, I ran a secondary result file via the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. On your Linux system(s) simply download/install the Phoronix Test Suite and then just run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1807067-AR-INTELCORE62 for your own fully-automated, side-by-side performance comparison against this smaller and less time consuming CPU benchmark result set.