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 |
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| 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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just4U - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
I don't recall AMD ever being in that position before. Even with the Athlon they were outmanned in all areas except for performance. Unfair business practices by Intel and a inability to keep up with demand on the manufacturing side took away any lead AMD had at the time. On top of that they were never competing price wise. Amd chips were sold for a fair amount less. I only recall one cpu being priced similar to Intel's top dog and it was dropped down to 30% less a few months later.edzieba - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
"CLWB attempts to minimize the compulsory cache miss if the same data is accessed temporally after the line is flushed if the same data is accessed temporally after the line is flushed. "Probably unintentional, but appropriate!
Spunjji - Tuesday, January 29, 2019 - link
I liked that one, tooiwod - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Just two things.1. The Article should have been split into at least two parts, separating each by at least 3 to 7 days. First parts being Intel 10nm, 2nd Part being Cannon Lake and how it perform.
2. Basically Cannonlake sucks. Lets hope Icelake will not disappoint.
nevcairiel - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
This incarnation of 10nm is only ever going to be seen in this particular chip, so its really quite closely related. The production-grade 10nm we're getting end 2019 is already going to be one step up from that.iwod - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
Yes but the article is way too long for a single read.saylick - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Wow, this is why I visit Anandtech; the deep dives are truly deep dives, unlike how some other "tech blog" sites pawn off articles as "deep dives" when all they do is regurgitate information off of official technical slides. Kudos Ian!austinsguitar - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
i bet amd has them shaking in their boots...PeachNCream - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
"The CPU area is instead attached at three points, and there is an additional pad to stop the chassis from rubbing against the heatpipe. This means that the chip height combined with the PCB and the heatsink is enough to start to worry how the chassis brushes up against the internals? Interesting."This isn't an uncommon practice. Laptop bottom panels can flex so the placement of pads is quite typical. Even my old Core2 Dell Latitude e6400 has pads on the heat pipe.
KOneJ - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
Excellent point. I think I remember this on an old Toshiba C55D E-1200 APU and a Dell Latitude D610 based on a Dothan Pentium M.