Intel Core i7 8086K Linux Performance

For the purposes of this initial Core i7 8086K Linux benchmarking, the following CPUs were tested for this comparison on Ubuntu:

- AMD Ryzen 7 1800X - 8 Cores / 16 Threads, 3.6GHz base clock, 4.0GHz boost clock - $240 USD
- AMD Ryzen 7 2700 - 8 Cores / 16 Threads, 3.2GHz base clock, 4.1GHz boost clock - $295 USD
- AMD Ryzen 7 2700X - 8 Cores / 16 Threads, 3.7GHz base clock, 4.3GHz boost clock - $320 USD
- Intel Core i7 8700K - 6 Cores / 12 Threads, 3.7GHz base clock, 4.7GHz turbo clock - $370 USD
- Intel Core i7 8086K - 6 Cores / 12 Threads, 4.0GHz base clock, 5.0GHz turbo clock - $425 USD

The Intel CPUs were using an Arctic Cooling Freezer i11 heatsink, which tends to be our go-to heatsink since it does the job while fitting within 4U chassis height requirements for our rackmounted test systems. The AMD CPUs were using their stock heatsinks.

Each of the test setups had 2 x 8GB DDR4-3200MHz Corsair memory, 120GB Intel SSDPEK1W120GA NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX Vega 64 graphics. The software stack used throughout was an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS installation but with upgrading to the Linux 4.18 Git kernel as of this week. Additionally, the CPU frequency scaling governor on each of the systems was set to the "performance" mode rather than ondemand/powersave. Additionally, the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS on each system was set to "-O3 -march=native" for optimizing the benchmarks built from source to each CPU under test.

All of the motherboards in use were on their latest BIOS and with the Linux 4.18 kernel provided for all relevant CPU Meltdown/Spectre mitigations on each of the systems as enabled by default.

With the Core i7 8086K benchmark run was also a secondary run when the CPU was overclocked to 5.00GHz on all cores. While we aren't much into overclocking at Phoronix as you can read about overclocking results on dozens of Windows websites, overclocking the i7-8086K was extremely easy to get to 5.0GHz across all cores (rather than the stock 5.0GHz single-core turbo frequency maximum). It took about two minutes from the ASUS PRIME Z370-A motherboard BIOS to achieve this overclock and was stable across all of the benchmarks ran in this article.

First up with our results are all of the raw performance metrics joined by various CPU thermal and AC system power consumption and performance-per-Watt metrics followed by some UHD Graphics 630 tests and performance-per-dollar metrics. The Phoronix Test Suite was used for carrying out all of these benchmarks in a fully-automated and reproducible manner, including the automated collection of CPU thermal and AC system power consumption (polled via a USB-based WattsUp Pro power meter) data. At the end of the article are the simply commands you can use with the Phoronix Test Suite for carrying out your own automated benchmark comparison against the results in this article.