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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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?