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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dgingeri - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
With Intel recently releasing the "F" SKUs for processors that don't have integrated graphics, I would think this processor would be a Core i3-8121FU.KOneJ - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
ROFL, mate. Though a UF line-up honestly wouldn't surprise me with where MCMs, TSVs, yields, iGPUs, and core counts are seemingly headed.Piotrek54321 - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
I would love an article on how quantum mechanical effects have to be taken into account at such small nodes.KOneJ - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
I would love to see the mathematics of quantum mechanics cleaned up to be more elegant and less Newtonian in nature.Rudde - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
I looked into the transistor density of different nodes and particularily the claim that Intel 10nm will feature "100 million transistors per square millimeter."Intel seems to historically lack in transistor density. 22nm has ~8 million per mm², while competing 28nm from GlobalFoundries have ~13 and TSMC has ~12.
Moving unto 14nm and all foundries double their transistor density. Intel goes to 15M/mm², GF to 24 (on a node bought from Samsung) and TSMC's 16nm also to 24M/mm².
TSMC's 7nm node has a density of ~40M/mm².
Now Intel has made two statements (both found in the first page of the article):
1. 100 million transistors per mm² or a 5.7x improvement.
2. A 2.7x improvement in density over 14nm, which gives 55M/mm². 55M/mm² would be consistent with Intel's claim of beating TSMC's 7nm.
Next I'm assuming my calculations about Intel's transistor density are wrong, and that both of Intels claims are true. In that case Intel's current 14nm would be 27M/mm². Now of course we can't assume my calculations about GF and TSMC are correct either and we are left without any conclusion.
Rudde - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
I jumped the gun too early and didn't proceed to page two that explains a lot of the same things as I tries to explain, but uses actual node data and not chip sizes.smalM - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
Page two doesn't use actual node data, it uses Intel propaganda ;-)KOneJ - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
Yep, they're not the only ones optimizing libraries. They're trying to muddle transistors with design compiling. While this is fair, it's not taking into account that others are working both halves of the problem as well. Clearly meant to be misleading.sidm2k11 - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
How is the fan noise on the PN60? Mine makes a pretty loud whine all the time and temperatures regularly cross 80 on full load...My 4010u Brix PC is whisper quiet by comparison.alacard - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
Well that was a wonderfully intricate review. Thank you.