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: Legacy Tests
We have also included our legacy benchmarks in this section, representing a stack of older code for popular benchmarks.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
3DPM v1: Naïve Code Variant of 3DPM v2.1
The first legacy test in the suite is the first version of our 3DPM benchmark. This is the ultimate naïve version of the code, as if it was written by scientist with no knowledge of how computer hardware, compilers, or optimization works (which in fact, it was at the start). This represents a large body of scientific simulation out in the wild, where getting the answer is more important than it being fast (getting a result in 4 days is acceptable if it’s correct, rather than sending someone away for a year to learn to code and getting the result in 5 minutes).
In this version, the only real optimization was in the compiler flags (-O2, -fp:fast), compiling it in release mode, and enabling OpenMP in the main compute loops. The loops were not configured for function size, and one of the key slowdowns is false sharing in the cache. It also has long dependency chains based on the random number generation, which leads to relatively poor performance on specific compute microarchitectures.
3DPM v1 can be downloaded with our 3DPM v2 code here: 3DPMv2.1.rar (13.0 MB)
x264 HD 3.0: Older Transcode Test
This transcoding test is super old, and was used by Anand back in the day of Pentium 4 and Athlon II processors. Here a standardized 720p video is transcoded with a two-pass conversion, with the benchmark showing the frames-per-second of each pass. This benchmark is single-threaded, and between some micro-architectures we seem to actually hit an instructions-per-clock wall.
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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.