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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MrCommunistGen - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Normally I try to read the whole article (and I *am* looking forward to reading the rest of it) but I already have 2 comments:1. Maybe this review has been in progress for quite a while, but you can definitely buy the NUC8i3CYSM NUC on Amazon, at least in the US. It is shipped and sold by Amazon not some random 3rd party too. It is expensive ($530), and can only be bought with up to 8GB of soldered down RAM, but you can buy it.
2. While the Wi-Fi card is M.2, Lenovo (like HP and others) usually restricts what Wi-Fi cards can be used with a BIOS/UEFI whitelist. I guess this might not apply to a China-only model, but I wouldn't just assume that the card can be upgraded down the line unless you've already verified this is possible.
jaju123 - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
I would chalk up the system resonsiveness to the GPU and the low screen res. When moving from a Dell XPS 15 9560 laptop with 1080p screen resolution to an otherwise identical 4K model, I noticed a severe loss of performance in the windows UI. The reality is that Intel iGPUs in even kaby lake processors are simply not enough to provide a smooth experience on high res laptops. The 1080p experience was really smooth, however.You can also force certain apps to the use the dedicated nvidia graphics, or simply choose to run at a non-native 1080p and it speeds up the UI drastically.
hansmuff - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Wow, this is an excellent article. Packed with knowledge and facts, well written; a real gem. Thank you!FreckledTrout - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Its weird to see a dual core even in a laptop on the new 10nm process. I would have expected dual cores to disappear with Intel's 10nm or AMD's 7nm.FreckledTrout - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
The first dual core laptop came out in 2015 with the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800 so it's just weird to me 14 years later it's still something being made especially with such a dense process.FreckledTrout - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Damn no edit.... in 2005 I meant.jeremyshaw - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
I think I had one of those in a Sharp laptop. It had horrible VIA S3 graphics, but a beautiful, bright display. It was my last 4:3 laptop, an end of an era for me.Icehawk - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
Majority of laptops are still DC, I have to check our laptop orders when we place them to make sure my boss and our vendor aren’t screwing up ordering them.ianmills - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Intel probably thought the same as you! Remember the reason this was released was so that Intel could tell its investors it was shipping 10nm partsdanwat1234 - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Agreed.