For those looking at upgrading a server or workstation to an Intel Xeon E3 v5 "Skylake" processor, here is a nine-way benchmark comparison of these processors compared to older Haswell Xeons as well as an AMD FX processor for reference. The benchmarks today were done under Ubuntu Linux and besides looking at raw performance we also have test results for the CPU thermal performance, system power consumption, performance-per-Watt, and performance-per-dollar metrics with a total of 14 AMD/Intel processors.

To date the only Skylake Xeon we had been able to test was the Intel Xeon E3 1245 v5 that I ended up buying for one of our Linux test servers. Fortunately, thanks to the kind (and Linux-interested) folks at MSI, they have lent us nine different Xeon E3 processors for testing.