Intel Pentium G4400: Benchmarking A ~$60 Skylake Processor

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Pentium G4400: Benchmarking A ~$60 Skylake Processor

The Pentium G4400 is currently the cheapest available Skylake socketed processor with a retail price of under $70 USD. Curious about the performance for this dual-core Skylake CPU, I decided to buy one for some Linux benchmarking at Phoronix for looking at the dual-core Skylake performance and the HD Graphics 510 capabilities.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=22473

[artivision]

Phoronix: Intel Pentium G4400: Benchmarking A ~$60 Skylake Processor

The Pentium G4400 is currently the cheapest available Skylake socketed processor with a retail price of under $70 USD. Curious about the performance for this dual-core Skylake CPU, I decided to buy one for some Linux benchmarking at Phoronix for looking at the dual-core Skylake performance and the HD Graphics 510 capabilities.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=22473

You don't really know much about CPUs: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/di...-the-witcher-3

Pentium G4500_GT2 is the value for many best in the world Cpu.

[Guest]

Phoronix: Intel Pentium G4400: Benchmarking A ~$60 Skylake Processor

The Pentium G4400 is currently the cheapest available Skylake socketed processor with a retail price of under $70 USD. Curious about the performance for this dual-core Skylake CPU, I decided to buy one for some Linux benchmarking at Phoronix for looking at the dual-core Skylake performance and the HD Graphics 510 capabilities.
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=22473

According to http://ark.intel.com/products/88179/...Cache-3_30-GHz the CPU completely lacks any kind of AVX. The article says that "this Skylake Pentium processor lacks AVX 2.0 support" which may wrongly imply that the CPU supports AVX 1.0. Later, the article says "Skylake Pentium CPUs don't have AVX support".

[carewolf]

According to http://ark.intel.com/products/88179/...Cache-3_30-GHz the CPU completely lacks any kind of AVX. The article says that "this Skylake Pentium processor lacks AVX 2.0 support" which may wrongly imply that the CPU supports AVX 1.0. Later, the article says "Skylake Pentium CPUs don't have AVX support".

Wow. That means Intel now has a strategy of market sepearation through SIMD extensions support.

Xeon: Avx-512
Core: Avx 1/2
Pentium: SSE only

[artivision]

Its not SSE4.2 only, it's +Skylake instructions +any_extra_issue. Each generation Pentium is stronger than a generation before. A Skylake Pentium is stronger than an i3_simple AVX at the same frequency. I don't like Intel's strategy tho.

[ldesnogu]

Its not SSE4.2 only, it's +Skylake instructions +any_extra_issue. Each generation Pentium is stronger than a generation before. A Skylake Pentium is stronger than an i3_simple AVX at the same frequency. I don't like Intel's strategy tho.

That's wrong since if your application uses a lot of AVX then your Skylake Pentium will likely be slower as it will have to rely on SSE (or will just fail to run if the programmer didn't use ISA features detection + multiple code paths).

Intel segmentation has been going on for years and has slowed down adoption of AVX and other advanced ISA features. I have no word to express what I think of this, it's so utterly stupid.

[Michael]

You don't really know much about CPUs: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/di...-the-witcher-3

Pentium G4500_GT2 is the value for many best in the world Cpu.

I was mainly after looking at the outright cheapest SKL CPU.

[Michael]

According to http://ark.intel.com/products/88179/...Cache-3_30-GHz the CPU completely lacks any kind of AVX. The article says that "this Skylake Pentium processor lacks AVX 2.0 support" which may wrongly imply that the CPU supports AVX 1.0. Later, the article says "Skylake Pentium CPUs don't have AVX support".

Right, there is no AVX at all, sorry for confusion, will make it clearer.

[Guest]

That's wrong since if your application uses a lot of AVX then your Skylake Pentium will likely be slower as it will have to rely on SSE (or will just fail to run if the programmer didn't use ISA features detection + multiple code paths).

Intel segmentation has been going on for years and has slowed down adoption of AVX and other advanced ISA features. I have no word to express what I think of this, it's so utterly stupid.

- Yes. Maybe they could have implemented 256-bit AVX by splitting the work into two 128-bit words and by utilizing the SSE1-SSE4.2 execution units of the Skylake Pentium.

- AVX1 performance on Haswell isn't that good. According to some of my tests, performance of SSE code on Haswell is very close to performance of AVX1 code. I don't know about Skylake's SSE vs AVX performance. However, I believe that on Haswell it doesn't necessarily make sense to switch code from SSE to AVX. The same applies to AMD's Kaveri CPUs as well. These CPU's have some bottlenecks that may prevent AVX codes from running 2-times faster than SSE codes.

[ldesnogu]

- Yes. Maybe they could have implemented 256-bit AVX by splitting the work into two 128-bit words and by utilizing the SSE1-SSE4.2 execution units of the Skylake Pentium.

I guess they'd have to slightly extend SSE units, and increase register widths, but that's a way things could be done at low cost.

But in this particular case, all Core chips have AVX/AVX2, it's just that Intel decided to fuse them off to create different segments. (AVX-512 is a different story.)

- AVX1 performance on Haswell isn't that good. According to some of my tests, performance of SSE code on Haswell is very close to performance of AVX1 code. I don't know about Skylake's SSE vs AVX performance. However, I believe that on Haswell it doesn't necessarily make sense to switch code from SSE to AVX. The same applies to AMD's Kaveri CPUs as well. These CPU's have some bottlenecks that may prevent AVX codes from running 2-times faster than SSE codes.

OK, but given that AVX never is slower than SSE, and if you knew it was available on all CPU wouldn't you use it rather than using SSE?