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: Rendering Tests
Rendering is often a key target for processor workloads, lending itself to a professional environment. It comes in different formats as well, from 3D rendering through rasterization, such as games, or by ray tracing, and invokes the ability of the software to manage meshes, textures, collisions, aliasing, physics (in animations), and discarding unnecessary work. Most renderers offer CPU code paths, while a few use GPUs and select environments use FPGAs or dedicated ASICs. For big studios however, CPUs are still the hardware of choice.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Corona 1.3: Performance Render
An advanced performance based renderer for software such as 3ds Max and Cinema 4D, the Corona benchmark renders a generated scene as a standard under its 1.3 software version. Normally the GUI implementation of the benchmark shows the scene being built, and allows the user to upload the result as a ‘time to complete’.
We got in contact with the developer who gave us a command line version of the benchmark that does a direct output of results. Rather than reporting time, we report the average number of rays per second across six runs, as the performance scaling of a result per unit time is typically visually easier to understand.
The Corona benchmark website can be found at https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark
Corona is an AVX2 benchmark, and it would appear that the Cannon Lake CPU can't take full advantage of the functionality. There's still a 10% difference at fixed frequency.
Blender 2.79b: 3D Creation Suite
A high profile rendering tool, Blender is open-source allowing for massive amounts of configurability, and is used by a number of high-profile animation studios worldwide. The organization recently released a Blender benchmark package, a couple of weeks after we had narrowed our Blender test for our new suite, however their test can take over an hour. For our results, we run one of the sub-tests in that suite through the command line - a standard ‘bmw27’ scene in CPU only mode, and measure the time to complete the render.
Blender can be downloaded at https://www.blender.org/download/
Blender also uses an AVX2 code path, and we see that the CNL processor scored worse at stock settings than at fixed frequency settings. Again, this is likely due to a power or thermal issue.
LuxMark v3.1: LuxRender via Different Code Paths
As stated at the top, there are many different ways to process rendering data: CPU, GPU, Accelerator, and others. On top of that, there are many frameworks and APIs in which to program, depending on how the software will be used. LuxMark, a benchmark developed using the LuxRender engine, offers several different scenes and APIs.
Taken from the Linux Version of LuxMark
In our test, we run the simple ‘Ball’ scene on both the C++ and OpenCL code paths, but in CPU mode. This scene starts with a rough render and slowly improves the quality over two minutes, giving a final result in what is essentially an average ‘kilorays per second’.
POV-Ray 3.7.1: Ray Tracing
The Persistence of Vision ray tracing engine is another well-known benchmarking tool, which was in a state of relative hibernation until AMD released its Zen processors, to which suddenly both Intel and AMD were submitting code to the main branch of the open source project. For our test, we use the built-in benchmark for all-cores, called from the command line.
POV-Ray can be downloaded from http://www.povray.org/
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KOneJ - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
Bingo.Spunjji - Tuesday, January 29, 2019 - link
Truly magnificent.KateH - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
but please, if OP is interested in taking a whack at "articulating" i'd love to see what that looks like and how my translation faredMidwayman - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Interesing. So Basically no real possibility for desktop improvement until 2020 at least. They really are giving AMD a huge window to take the performance crown. Zen 2 is due to ship this year, right?BigMamaInHouse - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
And dont forget- there are many Dual/Quad core (lets Say from Q6600 ~SandyBridge to 7700K ) Intel PC's that gonna be upgraded finally with new Ryzen launch and those PC won't we upgraded for another 3+ Years,DanNeely - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
The lower end of that range has been upgrading for years. The upper end has no real reason to upgrade unless they're doing something other than gaming, since current games don't benefit from the higher core counts much.I'm in the middle with a 4790K; and still see myself on track for a nominal 2022 upgrade; short of games growing CPU demands significantly or unexpected hardware failures I don't see any need to bring it forward. The additional cores will be nice for future proofing; but what I'm mostly looking forward to is all the stuff outside the CPU.
My notional want list is 10GB ethernet, PCIe4(5?) to the GPU and SSD, 50/50 USB 3.x A/C mix, and DDR5. The first of these is starting to show up on halo priced mobos.
PCIe4 is rumored to be launching this year on AMD, although from the leaks so far it's not clear if it'll only reach the first x16 slot for the GPU or be more widely available (maximum trace lengths are short enough that anything other than M.2 on a not-dimm will probably need signal boosters increasing costs).
Dual USB-C is starting to show up on a few boards; but widerspread availability is likely to be blocked until the hardware to handle flipping the connector moves from a separate chip into the chipset itself.
DDR5 is supposed to start shipping in very limited quantities this year, but will be another year or two before reaching consumer devices.
My guess is late 2020/early 2021 before all the hardware I want is finally available; which fits well with the nominal 8y lifespan I'm targeting for my systems core components.
shadowx360 - Friday, February 1, 2019 - link
What is the point of DDR5? It's going to be beyond overpriced at launch for negligible performance gain. As for USB-C, you can find cases with front connectors.Gondalf - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Ask to TSMC, we have not any real date of shipment. Moreover we don't know how the new SKUs will perform.eastcoast_pete - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
I don't think TSMC would give anybody except their customer (AMD) an expected shipping date. Also, while we don't know how the new AMD processors will perform, we already know that I Intel's 10 nm tech was both late and hasn't performed so we'll. BTW, I am currently running all PCs around me on Intel chips, so no fanboy here. This disappointing 10 nm fiasco is bad for all of us, as we need Intel to egg on AMD and vice versa. If one of them drops behind, the other one gets lazy.eastcoast_pete - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
Damn autocorrect and no edit!