Intel Core i3 4130 On Linux

The Intel Core i3 4130 is a Haswell processor with HD Graphics 4400 and a dual-core part with Hyper Threading that retails for about $130 USD. While we have been amazed by the performance of high-end Core i7 Haswell CPUs, how's this budget-friendly processor? Here's a review of the Core i3 4130 CPU running Ubuntu Linux and compared to a variety of other processors.

The Core i3 4130 is dual-core with Hyper Threading to provide a total of four logical threads clocked at 3.40GHz but without any form of Turbo Boost. The Core i3 Haswell processor has 3MB of cache, Intel HD Graphics 4400 that clock up to 1.15GHz, and the rest of the CPUs features are the same as other Haswell CPUs with a 22nm process, AVX2 support and other new Haswell instruction set extensions, etc. The maximum TDP on the Core i3 4130 is 54 Watts.

By now most Phoronix readers should be very familiar with Intel's Haswell support on Linux, but if not there's been dozens of Haswell articles on Phoronix and over a hundred articles on various elements of Haswell Linux support from the graphics drivers to technical coverage. The Intel Core i3 4130 for this review wasn't a review sample but a CPU I had purchased to use for our new per-commit testing of Mesa and the Linux kernel. The CPU will be part of our new test farm for constantly carrying out automated performance tests of the very latest open-source Intel Linux graphics code to look for improvements and regressions in real-time using the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org.

For the Intel HD Graphics 4400 on Linux for the i3-4130, testing was already covered and benchmarked in separate Phoronix articles: Intel Haswell HD Graphics 4400 Are Great On Linux and the 7-Way Low-End Open-Source Linux GPU Comparison from this week also tests the i3-4130 against various AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on their respective open-source graphics drivers.

In this article we're looking at the CPU performance of the Core i3 4130 against an FX-8350 Vishera on the AMD side and the other CPUs tested were a Core i3 2120, Core i5 2400S, Core i5 2500K, Core i5 3470, Core i7 3770K, Core i7 3960X, Core i3 4130, and Core i7 4770K.

The system components were maintained the same where applicable. Ubuntu 13.10 was the operating system running with the Linux 3.11 64-bit kernel and GCC 4.8.1 compiler. All benchmarking was handled via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite software.