Intel's 10nm Cannon Lake and Core i3-8121U Deep Dive Review
by Ian Cutress on January 25, 2019 10:30 AM ESTStock CPU Performance: Office Tests
The Office test suite is designed to focus around more industry standard tests that focus on office workflows, system meetings, some synthetics, but we also bundle compiler performance in with this section. For users that have to evaluate hardware in general, these are usually the benchmarks that most consider.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
3DMark Physics: In-Game Physics Compute
Alongside PCMark is 3DMark, Futuremark’s (UL’s) gaming test suite. Each gaming tests consists of one or two GPU heavy scenes, along with a physics test that is indicative of when the test was written and the platform it is aimed at. The main overriding tests, in order of complexity, are Ice Storm, Cloud Gate, Sky Diver, Fire Strike, and Time Spy.
Some of the subtests offer variants, such as Ice Storm Unlimited, which is aimed at mobile platforms with an off-screen rendering, or Fire Strike Ultra which is aimed at high-end 4K systems with lots of the added features turned on. Time Spy also currently has an AVX-512 mode (which we may be using in the future).
For our tests, we report in Bench the results from every physics test, but for the sake of the review we keep it to the most demanding of each scene: Ice Storm Unlimited, Cloud Gate, Sky Diver, Fire Strike Ultra, and Time Spy.
In all tests, at fixed frequency, the processors act identical, however at stock frequencies that Kaby Lake chip just has more headroom to push.
GeekBench4: Synthetics
A common tool for cross-platform testing between mobile, PC, and Mac, GeekBench 4 is an ultimate exercise in synthetic testing across a range of algorithms looking for peak throughput. Tests include encryption, compression, fast Fourier transform, memory operations, n-body physics, matrix operations, histogram manipulation, and HTML parsing.
I’m including this test due to popular demand, although the results do come across as overly synthetic, and a lot of users often put a lot of weight behind the test due to the fact that it is compiled across different platforms (although with different compilers).
We record the main subtest scores (Crypto, Integer, Floating Point, Memory) in our benchmark database, but for the review we post the overall single and multi-threaded results.
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danwat1234 - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Intel ice Lake for performance laptops should be out by 2019 christmas. Then we will see if there are any IPC improvements in this new architecture. Probably not much...BigMamaInHouse - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
I think that Intel need 10nm for Data-centers for higher core count and profit, and their production focus will be on this area and not consumer desktop PC's.I don't see 9700K/9900K 10nm competitor until 2020.
Santoval - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link
Sunny Cove and Willow Cove are intermediate designs until the release of Ocean Cove, the "brand new" CPU architecture Jim Keller was hired to lead the design of. Since Ocean Cove has not yet appeared in Intel's schedule it either means that it will not be ready before at least 2022 or Intel is just being secretive.Or it might just be Golden Cove. Since Golden Cove will apparently be Intel's next new design, if the it is not actually Ocean Cove, then Ocean Cove will not be released until 2023 at the earliest (at 7nm). That's because Intel has never released two new designs one after the other without an optimization in-between. It's also possible that Intel will just "pull a Skylake" and rather than use a new design for Golden Cove they will just.. re-optimize it. In that case Ocean Cove should be released in 2022, right after Golden Cove.
Trevor08 - Friday, February 1, 2019 - link
For intel's sake (and ours), I hope they're working furiously on quantum CPU's.peevee - Monday, February 4, 2019 - link
So far, quantum is looking like a dead end. Maybe for specialized coprocessors in cryo environments in 10 years, but not for general-purpose computing AT ALL.There are much better, actually realistic directions for general-purpose computing on non-Von Neumann architectures, and that is where the future lies now that Moore's law is firmly dead and buried.
HStewart - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
There is not release information about desktops on Ice Lake. But I would not doubt that Ice Lake on desktop at that time. It going to be fun to compare new laptops and even desktops at that time.But keep in minor to Intel desktop market is a minor market and once performance is up, I would not doubt we will not see any difference in desktop vs mobile chips
Santoval - Monday, January 28, 2019 - link
We don't know how well Ice Lake / Sunny Cove will perform, but no matter how good it performs AMD will still have a market lead of 6 to 7 months (assuming a release of Zen 2 based Ryzen CPUs in May or June and an Intel HVM release of Sunny Cove in December).This assumes that Intel does not screw up again and moves back the launch of Sunny Cove into 2H 2020, which would be frankly catastrophic, at least for their client wing. Their 14nm process has been milked dry, they can no longer extract any more performance from it.
James5mith - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
"This is an M.2 module, which means it could be upgraded at a later date fairly easily."No, you can't. Lenovo only lets wifi/bluetooth cards with their custom firmware in their systems. If you boot the system with a standard (say Intel) wifi card, it refuses to boot.
That's the reason I stopped buying lenovo laptops despite liking their build and design.
jeremyshaw - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
They've stopped doing that since about ~2 years ago.levizx - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
Welcome to 2015.