The Skylake Core i3 (51W) CPU Review: i3-6320, i3-6300 and i3-6100 Tested
by Ian Cutress on August 8, 2016 9:00 AM ESTLegacy Benchmarks
Some of our legacy benchmarks have followed AnandTech for over a decade, showing how performance changes when the code bases stay the same in that period. Some of this software is still in common use today.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
3D Particle Movement v1
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. This is the original version, written in the style of a typical non-computer science student coding up an algorithm for their theoretical problem, and comes without any non-obvious optimizations not already performed by the compiler, such as false sharing.
With un-trained programming skills comes a myriad of results. 3DPMv1 is not cache bound, but highly affected by false sharing and IPC. Our Core i3 staircase is in effect, and AMD is badly affected requiring 8 threads to match/beat an i3. In our v2 results, the spread is a more believable, which goes to show that having the right programming paradigm (even just a couple of lines of code) can make a large difference.
CineBench 11.5 and 10
Cinebench is a widely known benchmarking tool for measuring performance relative to MAXON's animation software Cinema 4D. Cinebench has been optimized over a decade and focuses on purely CPU horsepower, meaning if there is a discrepancy in pure throughput characteristics, Cinebench is likely to show that discrepancy. Arguably other software doesn't make use of all the tools available, so the real world relevance might purely be academic, but given our large database of data for Cinebench it seems difficult to ignore a small five minute test. We run the modern version 15 in this test, as well as the older 11.5 and 10 due to our back data.
The older CB results mirror the CB15 test, albeit more compressed.
POV-Ray 3.7
POV-Ray is a common ray-tracing tool used to generate realistic looking scenes. We've used POV-Ray in its various guises over the years as a good benchmark for performance, as well as a tool on the march to ray-tracing limited immersive environments. We use the built-in multithreaded benchmark.
AMD gets a better showing in POV-Ray, with the $70 X4 845 going ahead of all of our Core i3 parts, and the older A10 sitting in between them. The older FX parts, despite their age, take advantage of the multi-threaded nature of the benchmark.
TrueCrypt 7.1
Before its discontinuation, TrueCrypt was a popular tool for WindowsXP to offer software encryption to a file system. The almost latest version, 7.1, is still widely used however the developers have stopped supporting it since the introduction of encrypted disk support in Windows 8/7/Vista from 5/2014, and as such any new security issues are unfixed.
x264 HD 3.0
Similarly, the x264 HD 3.0 package we use here is also kept for historic regressional data. The latest version is 5.0.1, and encodes a 1080p video clip into a high quality x264 file. Version 3.0 only performs the same test on a 720p file, and in most circumstances the software performance hits its limit on high end processors, but still works well for mainstream and low-end. Also, this version only takes a few minutes, whereas the latest can take over 90 minutes to run.
7-zip
7-Zip is a freeware compression/decompression tool that is widely deployed across the world. We run the included benchmark tool using a 50MB library and take the average of a set of fixed-time results.
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tipoo - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Looks like even a Skylake i3 may be able to retire the venerable 2400/2500K, higher frame rates and better frame times at that. However a native quad does prevent larger dips.Kevin G - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
I have a feeling much that is due to the higher base clock on the SkyLake i3 vs. the i5 2500K. Skylake's IPC improvements also help boost performance here too.The real challenge is if the i3 6320 can best the i5 2500k as the same 3.9 Ghz base clock speed. Sandy Bridge was a good overclocker so hitting those figures shouldn't be difficult at all.
tipoo - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
That's true, overclocked the difference would diminish. But you also get modernities like high clocked DDR4 in the switchover.At any rate, funny that a dual core i3 can now fluidly run just about everything, it's two cores are probably faster than the 8 in the current consoles.
Lolimaster - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Benchrmarks don't tell you about the hiccups when playing with a dual core. Specially with things like Crysis 3 or even worse ROt Tomb Raider where you get like half the fps just by using a dual core bs a cheapo Athlon 860K.gamerk2 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
That's why Frame Times are also measured, which catches those hitches.Samus - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
I had a lot of issues with my Sandy Bridge i3-2125 in Battlefield 3 circa 2011 with lag and poor minimum frame rates.After long discussions on the forums, it was determined disabling hyper threading actually improved frame rate consistency. So at least in the Sandy Bridge IPC, and probably dating back to Nehalem or even Prescott, Jackson Technology or whatever you want to call it, has a habit of stalling the pipeline if there are too many cache misses to complete the instruction. Obviously more cache resolves this, so the issue isn't as prominent on the i7's, and it would certainly explain why the 4MB i3's are more consistent performers than the 3MB variety.
Of course the only way to prove if hyper threading is causing performance inconsistency is to disable it. It'd be a damn unique investigation for Anandtech to do a IPC improvement impact on it's affect on hyper-threading performance over the years, perhaps even dating back to the P4.
AndrewJacksonZA - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
HOW ON EARTH DID I MISS THIS?!?!Thank you for introducing me to Intel's tech known as "Jackson!" This is now *SO* on my "To Buy" list!
Thank you Samus! :-D
bug77 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Neah, I went i5-2500k -> i5-6600k and there's no noticeable difference. The best part of the upgrade was those new I/O ports on the new motherboard, but it's a sad day when you upgrade after 4 years and the most you have to show is you new M2 or USB 3.1 ports (and USB 3.1 is only added through a 3rd party chip).Sure, if I bench it, the new i5 is faster, but since the old i5 wasn't exactly slow, I can't say that I see a significant improvement.
Now, if you mean that instead of getting an i5-2500k one can now look at a Skylake i3, I'm not going to argue with you there. Though (money permitting) the boost speed might be nice to have anyway.
Cellar Door - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
This is a poorly educated comment:a) Your perceived speed might be limited by your storage
b) You don't utilize your cpu's multitasking abilities fully(all cores)
Duckeenie - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Why did you continue to post your comment if you believed you were making poorly educated points?