Intel Core i5 10600K Comet Lake vs. Core i5 Skylake / Haswell / Sandy Bridge

As some additional Core i5 10600K Linux benchmarks for historical perspective, here is a look at how the Core i5 10600K looks in comparison to the Core i5 7600K Skylake, Core i5 4670 Haswell, and Core i5 2500K Sandy Bridge processors on Ubuntu Linux. There were 250 benchmarks ran on each of the CPUs under test.

The ~$270 Core i5 10600K "Comet Lake" processor features six cores and twelve threads with a 4.1GHz base frequency and 4.8GHz turbo frequency while having a 12MB L3 cache. The i5-10600L has a 125 Watt TDP. The i5-10600K is much better than the days of Intel Core i5 CPUs for several generations just being quad-core CPUs without Hyper Threading, but for quantifying the difference here is a look at this mid-range Comet Lake CPU to Kabylake, Haswell, and Sandy Bridge.

The Sandy Bridge, Haswell, Kabylake, and Comet Lake i5 systems were all configured with dual channel memory at the rated frequencies supported by each CPU, default clock frequencies, and storage and other components aligned with the time for those systems being in their prime. There are GPU/disk differences given that while this article is focused primarily just on the CPU performance benchmarks. All systems were freshly re-tested on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite, 250 benchmarks were ran each time on the Intel Core i5 CPUs benchmarked.