Intel Pentium G4400: Benchmarking A ~$60 Skylake Processor

Written by Michael Larabel in Processors on 28 November 2015 at 04:00 AM EST. Page 1 of 8. 31 Comments.

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.

The Pentium G4400 is a dual-core processor running at 3.3GHz without any Hyper Threading nor any Turbo Boost capability. This 3.3GHz dual-core CPU has a 54 Watt TDP and features Intel HD Graphics 510 that run up to a 1GHz frequency. This low-end CPU has a 3MB cache. Unlike the higher-end Core CPUs, this Skylake Pentium processor lacks AVX support. This Pentium processor also lacks vPro, TSX-NI, SIPP, and Trusted Execution Technology. The Pentium G4400 supports DDR4-2133/1866MHz memory or DDR3L-1600/1333MHz memory depending upon the motherboard.

This CPU certainly isn't meant for any really demanding workloads, but could serve as a potential Linux desktop with basic accelerated graphics via the HD Graphics 510. The Pentium G4400 is still rated to drive up to three displays and can handle 4K via HDMI/DP. Like the other Skylake processors with HD Graphics 530, the hardware can support up to OpenGL 4.4 / DirectX 12 but under Linux the current Mesa driver still only has full OpenGL 3.3 support with the GL 4.x support being a work-in-progress.

With a price of $65 USD at major Internet retailers, the Pentium G4400 is currently the cheapest listed desktop processor of the Skylake family. The next step above is the Pentium G4500 at around $90 USD, which will get you an extra 200MHz out of the CPU (3.5GHz base frequency). The cheapest Core model in the Skylake family is the Core i3 6100 at around $130 USD and that's for a 3.7GHz CPU that's dual-core but has Hyper Threading. The i3-6100 also has HD Graphics 530 and AVX 2.0 support. These Skylake processors can be found in stock at Amazon.com.

I've been running the Pentium G4400 for the past few days. The support has basically been on par under Linux and similar to that of other Skylake processors. My tests so far have been with Ubuntu 15.10 x86_64. For best support including audio, working 4K HDMI mode-setting, the HD Graphics enabled by default, etc, you'll want to upgrade to at least the Linux 4.3.0 kernel. For my testing I was running a Linux 4.4 kernel development snapshot.

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