Analyzing Intel Core M Performance: How 5Y10 can beat 5Y71 & the OEMs' Dilemma
by Brett Howse & Ian Cutress on April 8, 2015 8:00 AM EST3DMark Cloud Gate Results
3DMark Cloud Gate is a benchmark aimed at notebooks and home PCs, and is quite a bit less demanding. It has a DirectX 11 engine but is limited to Direct3D feature level 10, and is compatible with DirectX 10 hardware. The overall run is about three minutes.
There is not much more to be said about the Core i5 at this point. It does an admirable job keeping the GPU frequency almost flat during this benchmark. You can clearly see the Dell Venue 11 Pro ramping up frequencies on the CPU, which cause temperature spikes when this happens. When it throttles the CPU on this workload, it does free up enough thermal room to allow the GPU frequency to be fairly strong. We see a lot of throttling on the ASUS as well, but not quite as pronounced. Once again, on the physics test the GPU is pushed down in frequency to give the CPU more room. The Yoga 3 Pro tries its best but is once again limited by a much lower SoC temperature set point.
On the CPU side, we have a very similar situation to the Sky Diver benchmark. The ASUS once again keeps a higher average CPU frequency than all of the other Core M devices in this test. The Venue 11 is close though.
On the GPU side, the Zenbook and Venue 11 Pro are basically tied. The shorter and less demanding workload lets the Dell keep up despite not having as good of a cooling solution. But, averages are just averages. Clearly the ASUS keeps a substantially higher GPU frequency for much of this test, as is seen in the graph.
The SoC temperatures are actually quite high on the Zenbook in this test, with it coming close to the Venue 11 Pro, but the cooling system clearly is more efficient since the change in temperature on the ASUS is much more gradual than the spikes seen in the Venue 11 Pro. The Yoga 3 Pro tries to stay around 65°C but near the end the temperature does go above their target.
The overall benchmark results for this test are very similar to the previous 3DMark test. The ASUS comes in very close to the Dell Latitude with its Core i5, and the other devices fall back quite a ways. Long sustained GPU workloads are very difficult for both of the 5Y71 devices to handle.
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zodiacfml - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
A long for this look at the performance Core M. Thanks. Like all nice, popular movies the end is pretty expected after a review from the Asus UX305. It's also good that the Dell is there to provide the scores for no limitation on cooling for long continuous loads.After all this, I don't see any problem. The performance of the Asus is pretty expected as well having a tradional notebook design which is fairly overkill for the SDP/TDP.
I was a PC overclocker many years ago and then realized that underclocking and overclocking at the same time would be ideal. I believe the race to wider CPU dynamic range has become mainstream.
dragonsqrrl - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
"Each model comes with 4MB of L2 cache" On the first page.Shouldn't that be L3 cache?
dananski - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
I love how the Asus tries to draw a piano keyboard in the PCMark 8 Creative graph. Very creative of it.DryAir - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
The temperature x time graphs are all messed up. The lines goes "back" on many ocasions, indicating 2 different temperatures on a same time stamp. You should check the settings on whatever program you are using to generate these graphics.be_prime - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
I just signed up to comment on the same thing -- the graphs are so clearly distorted by some (no doubt well-intentioned) spline/smoothing that much (even most?) of the data we see here may be the product of a spline or interpolation process, and not represent a data measurement. Where the line goes "back", as DryAir pointed out, it implies time travel.That's a very big miss for a site that I've considered to be thoughtful and authoritative. The approach you took here presents false and interpolated data and obscures the quality of your research. Don't let the goal of an attractive graph ruin the whole point of the graph: showing the data.
These graphs are obviously impossible due to the spline/interpolation used, and should be replaced by a scatter plot or normal line graph.
Brett Howse - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
As I mentioned on the Devices and Test page, sometimes the devices were very heavily loaded and they were not able to log consistently. Sometimes they would log twice in the same second, but with slightly different values. One log would be time 0:00:01:05, and another would log 0:00:01:95 (for instance), but both would be truncated to the same second. Unfortunately that's just the limit of the software, since it only logs time to the nearest second. A second can be a lot of time for a CPU.be_prime - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
That's fine because those data points represent measurements.The problem here is you've used interpolated splines/curves which, in this case, actually show impossible or false information: the curve leaning "left" implies that the x-axis (time) is decreasing: that's time travel, and it'd be a bigger story than the Core M for sure, right?
Also recognize that if you're gathering data points, but drawing a line, you're always implicitly creating an interpolation between those points (at least in viewers minds). Usually, it doesn't matter so much. Here, the resulting lines are false, and I think Anandtech is a better publication than that.
As it stands, the interpolation/smoothing on your graphs implies time travel. Respectfully: please correct this (or, patent the relevant technology and profit!). If you're going to make your graphs look "pretty" and don't care if they're correct, I can't trust your results.
DryAir - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link
Sarcastic time travel jokes aside, I agree that you should change it somehow. Perhaps just change the data points to be connected to a straith line, instead of a smoothed one. Right now its looking very amateuristic, not matching an otherwise great and highly technical review.Brett Howse - Friday, April 10, 2015 - link
Ice Storm was the worst offender so I've re-generated the graphs with straight lines. There just was not enough data points on that one because it was so short.gw74 - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
I am furious that OEMs are using Core M in ultrabooks. It is the solution to a problem which does not exist. The Samsung Series 9 / ATIV 9 Plus use full fat i5 and i7 ULVs and the 2 tiny fans hardly ever come on. when they do, they sound like mice whispering. and huge battery life.Core M is not progress when used in the ultrabook factor. it is a step backwards and a ripoff.