The Ice Lake Benchmark Preview: Inside Intel's 10nm
by Dr. Ian Cutress on August 1, 2019 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- GPUs
- 10nm
- Core
- Ice Lake
- Cannon Lake
- Sunny Cove
- 10th Gen Core
Gaming Results (15W and 25W)
One of the biggest changes to the Ice Lake design is in the integrated graphics – Intel is now giving more focus and more die area to graphics, something it has arguably been neglecting for several years now. With Ice Lake, we move to a Gen11 graphics architecture, which is almost like the previous Gen9.5 but now with added support for variable rate shading (VRS), moving from 24 EUs to 64 EUs, and memory support up from LPDDR3-2133 to LPDDR4X-3733.
World of Tanks is a very CPU driven benchmark, and having the extra frequency of the 25W processor does help here. We're getting a sizeable uplift from Whiskey Lake, due to the extra EUs and memory frequency.
Our Final Fantasy test seemed to regress in 25W mode, although still within the noise. This test is still GPU bound, so adding the extra TDP to the CPU didn't actually help much. However, comparing to the Whiskey Lake integrated graphics, we've got over a 2x speedup.
Similarly with Civilization, with what is normally our 'IGP' settings, we are still GPU limited here.
One of Intel's newest features is Variable Rate Shading.
If developers add the option, soon to be an easy checkbox in Unity and Unreal, the game can decide to control the rate at which it shades pixels, from calculating every pixel down using one result across a 4x4 grid, to save compute power. Currently the only way to test this is with the 3DMark functional demo.
The new VRS test in 3DMark is designed as a feature test to show the potential uplift effect from enabling variable rate shading within a game. In both 15W and 25W modes, the data saw a good uplift, and we seemed to get more out of the 25W mode than the 15W mode.
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Klimax - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Audio/Video processing on the go. Those areas tend to get support for new extensions pretty fast. Maybe browsers. Microsoft has for a while supported AVX512 for codegen. Maybe graphics drivers might use it too. (Not sure how it is now, but Intel was pretty bad in using available instructions in their drivers.)Kevin G - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
It is also about ISA parity. This has been on of my running issues with x86 as a whole is that the ecosystem tends to spit out a new 'major' extension every two or three years and then segment it to certain parts of the market (AVX has yet to appear on Celerons, Atoms, Pentium etc. after 8 years of being availible on Sandy Bridge). The software development side would have more incentive to optimize code for AVX is it was universally available and they didn't have to worry about a new extension on on the horizon.*I should clarify that I am referring to user space ISA extensions here. New platforms etc. will likely introduce a handful of kernel and hypervisor extensions with every iteration but those should only matter to OS and driver developers.
Phynaz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Wrong wrong wrong.eva02langley - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Man, you two are easily the worst fanboys of all. Unable to see the big picture, only cherry picking whatever make sense to live in your delusional world of flying dinosaurs and laser sharks.Korguz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
how so eva02langley ?? to be fair.. ive seen the same from youHulk - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Great write-up Ian! Thank you so much for doing this. I have been reading a CPU reviews since 1998 so I think I know a thing or two about a good CPU review.wut - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Intel's being nice (because of the new people it hired) and this is what it gets- More criticism. Can't win, huhn? Post one article and one big troll strolls in the first minute.HStewart - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Ian,First of all, I think you did a wonderful and well down performance preview of Ice Lake mobile chips.
But I do have some important realistic question, especially with long history of issues with Intel going to 10nm
1. First of all, did Intel successfully overcome this hurdle? I am not yet sure they did for larger models - mostly like 2020 and more cores
2. Are all of Spectre/Meltdown security issues been fix with Ice Lake, personally no body has yet send a realistic virus on this stuff and appears that Intel has fix them all in this cpu.
3. IPC person people claimed it measurements were again 2015 Skylake cpu and you review indicates 8th generation cpus which sounds more likely
4/ AVX-512 has amazing results especially in one of benchmark, one of reason I got into CPU's and stuff, is because 3d content create, I think we see a new software in that area because SigGraph 2019/.
5. Internal Thunderbolt 3, yes it cost saving and yes we know USB4 is around the corner supporting it, but is there any performance advantages on the chip
5. I would to see performance test of new Dell XPS 13 2in1 against the Dell XPS 15 2in1, Even the 15 2in1 has higher power CPU and possibly GPU, I have feeling the new XPS 13 2in1 will give it a run for money, just for kicks you add the old 13 2in1
6, I am curious about what the performance of Y versions of Ice Lake will be like, not much was stated on it - how they compare to u.
7. Of course interested and curious about 35/45W versions of Ice Lake, I would say they will be out in early 2020.
Finally do you every see the merge of desktop chips and mobile chips, with power getting lower I would think that one day desktop chips would basically be the same as mobile.
eva02langley - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Nobody read that... just saying...HStewart - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Does any body truly reads these comments any way.. the Articles are great but comments are just opinions and every one has one.