Intel's 10nm Cannon Lake and Core i3-8121U Deep Dive Review
by Ian Cutress on January 25, 2019 10:30 AM ESTCPU Performance: SPEC2006 at 2.2 GHz
Aside from power, the other question is if the Cannon Lake microarchitecture is an efficient design. For most code paths, it holds the same core design elements as Skylake and Kaby Lake, and it does have additional optimizations for certain instructions, as we detailed earlier in this review. In order to do a direct IPC comparison, we are running SPEC2006 Speed on both of our comparison points at a fixed frequency of 2.2 GHz.
In order to get a fixed frequency on our chips required adjusting the relevant registers to disable the turbo modes. There is no setting in the BIOS to do this, but thankfully the folks at AIDA64 have a tool to do this and it works great. Choosing these two processors that both have a base frequency of 2.2 GHz make this a lot easier.
SPEC2006 is a series of industry standard tests designed to help differentiate performance levels between different architectures, microarchitectures, and compilers. All official submitted results from OEMs and manufacturers are posted online for comparison, and many vendors try and get the best results. From our perspective, these workloads are very well known, which enables a good benchmark for IPC analysis.
Credit for arranging the benchmarks goes completely to our resident Senior Mobile Editor, Andrei Frumusanu, who developed a suitable harness and framework to generate the relevant binaries for both mobile and PC. On PC, we run SPEC2006 through the Windows Subsystem for Linux – we still need to do testing for overhead (we’ll do it with SPEC2017 when Andrei is ready), but for the purposes of this test today, comparing like for like both under WSL is a valid comparison. Andrei compiled SPEC2006 for AVX2 instructions, using Clang 8. We run SPEC2006 Speed, which runs one copy of each test on one thread, of all the integer tests as well as the C++ based floating point tests.
Here are our results:
| SPEC2006 Speed (Estimated Results)* |
|||||
| Intel Core i3-8121U 10nm Cannon Lake |
AnandTech | Intel Core i3-8130U 14nm Kaby Lake |
|||
| Integer Workloads | |||||
| 24.8 | 400.perlbench | 26.1 | |||
| 16.6 | 401.bzip2 | 16.8 | |||
| 27.6 | 403.gcc | 27.3 | |||
| 25.9 | 429.mcf | 28.4 | |||
| 19.0 | 445.gobmk | 19.1 | |||
| 23.5 | 456.hmmr | 23.1 | |||
| 22.2 | 458.sjeng | 22.4 | |||
| 70.5 | 462.libquantum | 75.4 | |||
| 39.7 | 464.h264ref | 37.2 | |||
| 17.5 | 471.omnetpp | 18.2 | |||
| 14.2 | 473.astar | 14.1 | |||
| 27.1 | 483.xalancbmk | 28.4 | |||
| Floating Point Workloads | |||||
| 24.6 | 433.milc | 23.8 | |||
| 23.0 | 444.namd | 23.0 | |||
| 39.1 | 450.soplex | 37.3 | |||
| 34.1 | 453.povray | 33.5 | |||
| 59.9 | 470.lbm | 68.4 | |||
| 43.2 | 482.sphinx3 | 44.2 | |||
* SPEC rules dictate that any results not verified on the SPEC website are called 'estimated results', as they have not been verified.
By and large, we actually get parity between both processors on almost all the tests. The Kaby Lake processor seems to have a small advantage in libquantum and lbm, which are SIMD related, which could be limited by the memory latency difference shown on the previous page.
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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.