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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Gondalf - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
For now they have nothing out in cpu departement, so i don't see any AMD bright year in front of us.I remember you we are already in 2019.
vegajf51 - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Icelake Desktop 3q 2020, intel will have another 14nm refresh before then.HStewart - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
Intel is expected to release 10nm+ with Covey Lake by Christmas seasons. This canon lake chip is just a test chip.pugster - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Thanks for the review. While the performance is not great, what about the power consumption compared with the 8130U?Yorgos - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
it's not great obviously when you are stuck at 2.2GHz, while the prev gen cpu with the same capabilities(except the avx) can go up to 3.4GHz.I bet the 8130 would've been faster even if configured at 10Watt TDP.
Yorgos - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
...and before jumping on me about that "stuck at 2.2GHz" let me report this:in certain loads the locked freq is slower than the unlocked one.
What does this mean? it most probably means that the unlocked freq makes the cpu run hot, throttle and then try to balance between temperature and consumption.
and a subnote on this. I think Intel should stop pushing the AVX instructions. It doesn't work as intended, it's not needed in most cases, especially when you have to design 256bit buses for 512bit data transfer on a low power cpu. Also it takes a lot of space on the die, it taxes the cache buses and it's useless when you disable your igpu(which is a good SIMD machine but not hUMA) and you have a dGPU up all the time just rendering your desktop.
They should try focusing on HSA/hUMA on their cpus+igpus instead of integrating wide SIMD instructions inside their cores.
0ldman79 - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
Thing is when AVX2 and AVX512 are used the performance increase can be rather massive.PCSX2, PS2 emulator, runs identically between my 3.9GHz Ivy Bridge Xeon (AVX) and my 2.8GHz i5 Skylake mobile (AVX2).
AVX2 makes several games playable. You can choose your plugin and the AVX plugin cannot play Gran Turismo 4 @ 2.8GHz, the AVX2 plugin can.
You may not find it useful, others do.
HStewart - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
It would be interesting to see the emulator re-factor to work with AVX 512 - it would like be twice the speed of AVX 2levizx - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
Nope, even with the simplest data set where AVX512 can perform twice the speed of AVX2 per cycle, the frequency has to drop significantly (~30% on Xeon Gold 5120 for example), so the upper limit is more like 40% gain. And that's PURE AVX512 code, you won't get that in real life. Assuming 50% AVX2 and 50% AVX512 code - that's a very generous assumption for non-datacentre usage, you'll have a 5% net gain.levizx - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
5%~20% net gain, depending on how the scaling works.