Intel Core i7 7700K Linux Benchmarks
If you have been curious how well Intel's new Core i7 7700K "Kabylake" processor performs under Linux, I received this CPU a few days ago and have begun putting it through its paces. Here are my initial i7-7700K Linux benchmarks compared to various other Intel CPUs running Clear Linux.
I'll have more benchmarks of the Core i7 7700K on Linux in the days ahead. I've already published some Core i3 7100 and Core i5 7600K in the past two weeks while additionally this week I'll have some benchmarks on the low-end with the Pentium G4600 and Celeron G3930. So just look at this Core i7 7700K as our preliminary Linux benchmark results.
The Core i7 7700K is a quad-core processor with Hyper Threading to allow for eight logical threads. The i7-7700K has a base frequency of 4.2GHz with a boost frequency of 4.5GHz. This CPU has an 8MB SmartCache and the TDP on this 14nm CPU is 91 Watts. Graphics on the Core i7 7700K are HD Graphics 630 similar to the other Kabylake CPUs we've tested so far and with the 7700K the graphics cores clock up to 1.15GHz. Pricing on the Core i7 7700K is around $350 USD, including at NewEgg and Amazon.
The Core i7 7700K was tested with the same Z270 box as our other Kabylake tests so far: ASUS PRIME Z270-P motherboard, 2 x 8GB Corsair DDR4-2400MHz memory, Samsung 950 PRO 256GB NVMe SSD, and making use of the system's integrated graphics.
Intel's own Clear Linux distribution was used for testing given that it tends to be one of the best Linux distribution performers in general but especially so for the latest-generation processors given its use of CPUFreq over P-State by default and various other optimizations. Clear Linux was tested with the Linux 4.9.5 kernel, Xfce 4.12 desktop, X.Org Server 1.19.1, Mesa 17.0-devel, Beignet 1.3, GCC 6.3.0, and an EXT4 file-system.
The processors used for comparison with this initial testing included the Pentium G3258, Pentium G4400, Core i7 4770K, Core i7 4960X, Core i5 6500, Core i5 6600K, Core i3 7100, Core i5 7600K, Core i7 7700K, Xeon E5-2609 v4, Xeon E3-1235L v5, Xeon E3-1245 v5, and Xeon E3-1280 v5. The selection of systems used for comparison were those that I had available and unfortunately a sub-set of the older systems couldn't be tested due to two bugs in Clear Linux right now pertaining to UEFI working on older Sandy/Ivy Bridge era systems having some issues and also a network-related issue on some of the newer systems. So this comparison today is a bit limited but hopefully those issues will be rectified shortly so I can expand this comparison.
All of these benchmarks were carried out in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.