The Ice Lake Benchmark Preview: Inside Intel's 10nm
by Dr. Ian Cutress on August 1, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- GPUs
- 10nm
- Core
- Ice Lake
- Cannon Lake
- Sunny Cove
- 10th Gen Core
Power Results (15W and 25W)
Based on the SKU table, Intel was very keen to point out that all of the Y-series processors for Ice Lake and all the 15W U-series processors have cTDP up modes. This means that OEMs, if they build for it, can take advantage of a higher base power of a processor which leads to longer turbo periods and a higher frequency during sustained performance levels.
While cTDP is a good idea, one of the issues we have with the concept is that Intel’s OEM partners that design the laptops and notebooks for these processors don’t ever advertise or publicise if they’re using a CPU in cTDP up or down mode. I could understand why a vendor might not want to advertise using a down mode, but an up mode means extra performance, and it’s hard to tell from the outside what is going on.
For what it is worth, most users cannot change between these modes anyway. They are baked into the firmware and the operating system. However there are a few systems that do expose this to the user, as I recently found out with my Whiskey Lake-U platform, where the OS power plan has advanced options to set the TDP levels. Very interesting indeed.
Also, for Ice Lake-U, Intel is introducing a feature called Intel Dynamic Tuning 2.0.
We covered this in our architecture disclosure article, but the short and simple of it is that it allows OEMs to implement a system whereby the PL1/TDP of a system can change based on an algorithm over time. So it allows for higher strict turbo, and then adjusts the turbo budget over time.
This feature will be branded under Intel’s Adaptix brand, which covers all these CPU optimizations. However, it should be noted, that this feature is optional for the OEM. It requires the OEM to actually do the work to characterize the thermal profile of the system. We suspect that it will be mostly on premium devices, but as the chips roll out into cheaper systems, this will not be there. Intel is not making this feature standard.
Testing Power
Based on the time available, we weren’t able to do much power testing. What I was able to do was run a power profile during the start of our 3DPM AVX512 test in both 15W and 25W modes for the Core i7-1065G7.
The test here runs for 20 seconds, then rests for 10 seconds. Here are the first four sub-tests, and there are a lot of interesting points to note.
The peak power in these systems is clearly the PL2 mode, which on the Intel SDS platform seems to be around the 50W mode. Given that the functional test system is a bit of a chonk, with a strong thermal profile and the fan on all the time, this is perhaps to be expected. The suggested PL2 for Kaby Lake-R was 44W, so this might indicate a small jump in strategy. Of course, with the Kaby Lake-R designs, we never saw many devices that actually had a PL2 of 44W – most OEMs chose something smaller, like 22W or 35W.
The fact that the CPU can sustain a 50W PL2 means that Intel could easily release Ice Lake into the desktop market at the 35W range. Easy. Please do this Intel.
Second to note is the AVX-512 frequency. Not listed here, but under the 15W mode we saw the AVX-512 frequency around 1.0-1.1 GHz, while at 25W it was around 1.4-1.5 GHz. That’s quite a drop from non AVX-512 code, for sure.
Third, we come to the turbo window. Increasing the base TDP means that the turbo window has more budget to turbo, and we can see that this equates to more than 2x on all the sub-tests. In the 15W mode, on the first test, we blow through the budget within 5 seconds, but on the 25W mode, we can actually turbo all the way through the 20 seconds of the first test. This means that there is still technically budget on the table by the time we start the second test under the 25W mode.
Also, that third test – if you are wondering why that graph looks a little light on the data points compared to the others, it is because the AVX-512 instructions took so much of the time on the CPU, that our power software didn’t get any for itself to update the power values. We still got enough to make a graph, but that just goes to show what hammering the CPU can do.
For the base power consumption, we actually have an issue here with the observer effect. Our polling software is polling too often and spiking up the power a little bit. However, if we take the average power consumption between 25-30 seconds, under 25W this is 2.96W, and under 15W this is 2.87W, which is similar.
For users interested in the score differential between the two:
For 3DPM without AVX instructions, the 15W mode scored 816, and 25W mode scored 1020 (+25%).
For 3DPM with AVX-512, the 15W mode scored 7204, and 25W mode scored 9242 (+28%).
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Ratman6161 - Wednesday, August 7, 2019 - link
"Did we really learn something new from this piece? Not really would be my answer."Actually I learned something. To me this showed that once Ice Lake systems hit the market, it will be time for me to start looking for a deal on A Whiskey Lake system. We see potential performance increases in some things but not others and the things more interesting to me personally fall into the tests where there isn't much difference.
Besides, everyone understands this is a pre-release system and much more data will be needed to really make a decision...at least I thought everyone understands. My personal experience with laptops in general has been that how good the cooling performance is is probably the most important factor in real world performance as most of them will thermal throttle long before you get any kind of sustained performance out of them anyway.
casperes1996 - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Don't let comments like this get to you, Ian.It was an excellent article, considering the limited time you had with the platform. There will always be people calling fanboyism or the like no matter which company is in focus. You balanced it all as well as you could with the time you had the device for, and it was a great read.
If anything I'd actually say it sometimes came off as being a bit anti-Intel; Not in terms of their products, but the whole thing with them trying to involve themselves more in how you test their stuff, perhaps to their advantage. Sometimes sounded a bit "Just let me do my job and I'll let you do yours". But I thought that was kinda good ;)
eva02langley - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Well, the thing is more about the free advertisement. You are not the only one who went there. Toms did and their testing are downright different from yours. I believe your numbers way more than theirs, however there is a cost of being part of scheme like this.CityBlue - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
> We do our own validation of the platform to remove as much Intel involvement as possible.You say that, but it's difficult to believe Anandtech can be trusted when you botched the Ryzen 3 benchmark reviews so so badly and have subsequently been in denial ever since (looking at you, Ryan on reddit).
You personally have suggested that security isn't important so any performance impact resulting from security mitigations doesn't sound like something you would personally care about, thus playing right into the hands of a firm like Intel.
So, can you trusted? That would be a big fat "no" from me, I'm afraid.
Jorgp2 - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Lol, this is exactly what qualcomm does.Its just a preview, they will do better testing at release.
brakdoo - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Yeah the Qualcomm pieces were problematic too because they could have just released a few benchmarks (and they did) to give us a rough understanding of the performance.The real power consumption and performance (especially therm. throttled) came later in real world tests.
It was not until Andrei compared the 855 to the Kirin 980 when we saw the Kirin to be slightly faster and more efficient in pure CPU tests.
At least Qualcomm made real statements about release dates and those chips being really high volume. We still don't know whether or not Ice Lake will be in just a few laptops.
Andrei Frumusanu - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
The 855 preview contained almost our whole test suite, with just the thermal GPU tests missing due to lack of time.> It was not until Andrei compared the 855 to the Kirin 980 when we saw the Kirin to be slightly faster and more efficient in pure CPU tests.
This was included in the preview, and not later:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13786/snapdragon-85...
The S10 review essentially had no changes on those numbers.
Valantar - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
brakdoo: your stance here is nonsense. You're arguing that it's _more_ problematic to accept special access to do your own independent testing than it is to simply accept a company's marketing statements in good faith? That makes _zero_ sense, and is certainly not how journalism is supposed to work. Articles like this are very valuable as they give interested readers information that can be trusted to a certain degree (even if the test platform isn't what they're going to be buying in the future), unlike marketing statements which always have some spin.Ian: Excellent article, and good job getting all that work done in just eight hours. Keep up the good work.
FunBunny2 - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
"Now 5G is just sub-6 and the only important part is massive MIMO"cute. I've been, ever since 5G was a twinkle in the eye of whoever, that mmWave 5G was, and always will be, vaporware. getting it to work in the real world, when engineers and scientists have known for decades how microwave (and near) propagates, is a non-starter. the telecom BS has reached ever new highs.
Eletriarnation - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
This seems like a good thing to me - we're getting useful information earlier, even if it is limited in scope. It's not like AMD offered the same and you turned them down. Keep up the good work!