Intel Core i5 10600K + Core i9 10900K Linux Performance Benchmarks
Intel announced at the end of April the 10th Gen Core "Comet Lake" S-Series CPUs with the Core i9 10900K being their new top-end processor with a 10 core / 20 thread processor that can clock up to 5.3GHz. The Comet Lake S-Series desktop CPUs are now shipping and this morning the embargo lifts in being able to publish the benchmarks. Here is how the Intel Core i5 10500K and Core i9 10900K processors are performing on Linux from Steam on Linux gaming to various interesting real-world workloads.
The Intel Core i9 10900K 10-core/20-thread processor has a 3.7GHz base clock with a 5.3GHz thermal velocity boost single-core boost frequency but for the multi-core Turbo Boost frequency is in the 5.1~5.2GHz range. The CPU has a 125 Watt TDP but as also shown in our testing today it can peak much, much higher than that. This CPU is available today for around $488 USD.
The Intel Core i5 10600K meanwhile will retail for around $262 and is a six core / 12 thread CPU with a 4.1GHz base frequency and can turbo up to 4.8GHz or 4.5GHz for its all-core turbo frequency. This 6c/12t CPU has a 125 Watt TDP.
These CPUs have the usual features of Intel UHD Graphics 630, dual channel DDR4-2933, and up to 40 lanes of PCI Express 3.0 support as we've been used to seeing in recent generations.
Intel supplied review samples on the i5-10600K and i9-10900K for our Linux benchmarking. They also supplied a Gigabyte Z490 Aorus Master motherboard. One Linux support caveat pertaining to the Z490 motherboard is the Ethernet not working out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 20.04's Linux 5.4 based kernel but once switching to Linux 5.6 stable or Linux 5.7 Git, the Ethernet is working. The WiFi though was working out-of-the-box on 5.4.
Aside from needing a newer kernel for Ethernet, the new Comet Lake support is in good shape (as would be expected as this isn't a new microarchitecture) and no other Z490 issues encountered yet.
Via the Phoronix Test Suite we have been running many Linux benchmarks in recent weeks. For today's article is a look at the following stack of CPUs tested recently on Ubuntu 20.04:
- Core i5 9400F
- Core i9 9900K
- Core i9 9900KS
- Core i5 10600K
- Core i9 10900K
- Ryzen 3 3100
- Ryzen 3 3300X
- Ryzen 5 3600X
- Ryzen 7 3700X
- Ryzen 9 3900X
- Ryzen 9 3950X
Following those CPU/system Linux benchmarks are a number of Linux gaming benchmarks carried out with the higher-end processors. For the initial CPUs being tested were using memory for each of the CPUs at the maximum frequency and number of available memory channels for each configuration and a Crucial SSD. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS was used for all of the testing. During the gaming benchmarks, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER was used for those tests with the NVIDIA 440.82 driver. Let's get on to looking at the Comet Lake S performance under Ubuntu Linux.