Intel Pentium G4600: A Surprising 3.6GHz Kabylake CPU For $90

Lastly are some OpenCL tests on the Pentium G4600 with its HD Graphics 630 by making use of Beignet 1.3's OpenCL 2.0 support.

You can find more Intel Beignet OpenCL results with these systems via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file. Similar to the OpenGL graphics performance, the Pentium G4600's performance with the HD Graphics 630 is quite competent, a noticeable upgrade from the Pentium G4400 and older, and not a bad value.

Overall the Pentium G4600 doesn't appear to be a bad processor at all for either a budget system, potentially some media/HTPC use-cases, and other workloads that aren't heavily multi-threaded. The Pentium G4600 performed better than the G4400/G3258 particularly with OpenGL/OpenCL with the Kabylake HD Graphics 630, in some CPU tests it competed well against even the i7-4770K and i5-6500 due to its high 3.6GHz clock frequency compared to those older CPUs only boosting close to that, and its 51 Watt TDP makes it ideal for a SFF PC build.

The Pentium G4600 isn't adequate though for heavily threaded workloads and applications that prefer a greater amount of CPU cache. The Pentium CPU also does poorly for applications that benefit greatly from AVX/AVX2 support. But overall for a CPU less than $90 USD I am happy with the purchase and will be playing around with this processor in a few more tests in future articles on Phoronix.

If you are interested in the Pentium G4600 you can find it for around $90 USD at Amazon.com and NewEgg.com.

If you want to compare your own Linux system's performance to the results in this article, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1701307-RI-INTELKABY60 to compare your results in a fully-automated, side-by-side, and reproducible manner.