9-Way Intel Xeon E3 v5 Skylake Benchmarks On Ubuntu Linux

The hardware used during all of the Intel Xeon E3 Skylake testing was an MSI C236A Workstation motherboard, 2 x 8GB Crucial DDR4-2133MHz EUDIMM memory, 120GB OCZ Trion 150 SSD, and a MSI Radeon R7 370 graphics card. For the Xeons having integrated graphics, they were also tested. The other test systems were also using the same SSD and also 16GB of RAM with DDR4/DDR3 that matched the processor's maximum supported frequency and maximum number of memory channels supported.

The Linux stack used for this large processor comparison was a clean development installation of Ubuntu 16.04 x86_64. This Ubuntu 16.04 LTS installation was upgraded to the Linux 4.5 Git kernel, using an EXT4 file-system by default, and GCC 5.3.1 was the host compiler.

Thanks again to MSI's support for making this testing possible and loaning the E3 v5 processors to us so that they could be used for this comparison. Over the 12+ years of running Phoronix, MSI continues to be one of the more active companies willing to send out hardware review samples specifically for Linux enthusiast testing, they've engaged in Linux BIOS/UEFI updating from the desktop, and more. The MSI C236A Workstation board they sent over has also been playing nicely under Linux so far and I'll have my more thorough write-up about this Skylake motherboard shortly. In the days ahead will also be some GCC vs. LLVM Clang, Linux OS distribution comparison, and other interesting open-source/Linux/BSD tests from these new processors.

First up are the raw performance benchmarks for these fourteen different processors. Following that are the CPU thermal performance, performance-per-Watt / AC system power consumption, and performance-per-dollar benchmarks. All of this benchmarking was facilitated in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. The Phoronix Test Suite was monitoring the AC system power consumption using the USB-based WattsUp Pro. The CPU temperature was measured using the coretemp Linux driver. The performance-per-dollar benchmarking were based on each of the processor's list price. For all of the Xeon E3 v5 CPU testing, an Arctic Cooling i11 HSF was used.

Let's go see these exciting Intel/AMD Linux CPU benchmark results!