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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0ldman79 - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
This whole situation begs the question, what could Intel have gotten out of 65nm, 32nm, 22nm, etc, had they run it for five generations.I wonder if they'll do similarly on the 10nm process, punt the first time or two then knock it out of the park. Skylake was a beautiful success. Maybe Sunny Cove will be the same for 10nm.
StrangerGuy - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
The point is Intel now needs better uarch designers lot more than process designers. Yes 10nm improvements is hard work and an interesting read...but for users they ultimately only care about end performance and perf/$, not die sizes, transistors/mm2 or manufacturing margins. If Zen 2 blows the doors off CFL would anybody even care about about Intel's process advantage? Hell not.KOneJ - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
Doubt this is even an "if" at this point. Curious to see if *Cove cores can keep Zen 4 and later from running away too much. Only time will tell, but Intel bringing in guys like Keller can't possibly be a bad thing. And in spite of their disastrous former attempts at building a dGPU, I fully expect Intel to make it happen this go around.eva02langley - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
The problem is, do you believe 7nm would be any different? Unless they implement EUV directly, I don't see it. Intel will be force, like AMD, to go fab less because their node will not be better than the competition. To add to it, it is most likely be behind in time to.zodiacfml - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
Great job again though it doesn't warrant it for this Intel junk. Looks like they're paying Lenovo just to use Cannon lake, usable chips that came from tuning manufacturing.The performance is where I expected it to be.
I still stand to my theory that Intel is reluctant to spend, leaving their engineers stressing if they can produce 10nm products without new equipment.
Anyways, it is a dead horse. AMD will be all the rage for 2019.
KOneJ - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
"Intel is reluctant to spend"To the contrary: throwing money at the problem is exactly what they're doing. Have you tracked their CAPEX these past few years?
"AMD will be all the rage for 2019."
I think that's basically a given.
zodiacfml - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
The reports were pretty vague and I don't remember them spending substantial money except the news that they're spending for more capacity on 14nm.AMD is pretty lukewarm for me last year. I'm certain that this year will be a lot stronger for AMD until Intel and Nvidia starts taking their customers more seriously.
KOneJ - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
Even for a company Intel's size, spending north of $12B a year isn't penny-pinching. I know their revenue and margins are massive, but their failings haven't been a lack of spending since SB. They've been progressively spending more than ever.YoloPascual - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
bUt 10nm iNtEL iS bEtTeR tHaN 7nm TSMC riGhT?KOneJ - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
Shouldn't your alias be yOlOpAsCuAl, wannabe troll?