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
System Results (15W)
When testing a laptop system, there are various angles to consider on how to test: either user experience benchmarks, that are mostly single threaded and give a good boost to how systems implement a deal of turbo, or sustained benchmarks that test how the system performs when you push it. Intel has gone out of its way to emphasise the former for the next generation of mobile CPUs: they would prefer that reviewers stick to very user experience-like tests, rather than say, rendering programs. The problem there is that outside a number of canned benchmarks, it can be difficult. Users, and especially creators, that typically spend a lot on a premium device, might actually be doing sustained benchmarks.
Given the time that we had to test, we were actually limited in what we could arrange.
On AVX-512, the Ice Lake part destroys the competition.
These last two tests are typically our more memory sensitive tests, and the LPDDR4X-3733 really does win out over the LPDDR3-2133 in the other systems.
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Ratman6161 - Wednesday, August 7, 2019 - link
"Did we really learn something new from this piece? Not really would be my answer."Actually I learned something. To me this showed that once Ice Lake systems hit the market, it will be time for me to start looking for a deal on A Whiskey Lake system. We see potential performance increases in some things but not others and the things more interesting to me personally fall into the tests where there isn't much difference.
Besides, everyone understands this is a pre-release system and much more data will be needed to really make a decision...at least I thought everyone understands. My personal experience with laptops in general has been that how good the cooling performance is is probably the most important factor in real world performance as most of them will thermal throttle long before you get any kind of sustained performance out of them anyway.
casperes1996 - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Don't let comments like this get to you, Ian.It was an excellent article, considering the limited time you had with the platform. There will always be people calling fanboyism or the like no matter which company is in focus. You balanced it all as well as you could with the time you had the device for, and it was a great read.
If anything I'd actually say it sometimes came off as being a bit anti-Intel; Not in terms of their products, but the whole thing with them trying to involve themselves more in how you test their stuff, perhaps to their advantage. Sometimes sounded a bit "Just let me do my job and I'll let you do yours". But I thought that was kinda good ;)
eva02langley - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Well, the thing is more about the free advertisement. You are not the only one who went there. Toms did and their testing are downright different from yours. I believe your numbers way more than theirs, however there is a cost of being part of scheme like this.CityBlue - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
> We do our own validation of the platform to remove as much Intel involvement as possible.You say that, but it's difficult to believe Anandtech can be trusted when you botched the Ryzen 3 benchmark reviews so so badly and have subsequently been in denial ever since (looking at you, Ryan on reddit).
You personally have suggested that security isn't important so any performance impact resulting from security mitigations doesn't sound like something you would personally care about, thus playing right into the hands of a firm like Intel.
So, can you trusted? That would be a big fat "no" from me, I'm afraid.
Jorgp2 - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Lol, this is exactly what qualcomm does.Its just a preview, they will do better testing at release.
brakdoo - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Yeah the Qualcomm pieces were problematic too because they could have just released a few benchmarks (and they did) to give us a rough understanding of the performance.The real power consumption and performance (especially therm. throttled) came later in real world tests.
It was not until Andrei compared the 855 to the Kirin 980 when we saw the Kirin to be slightly faster and more efficient in pure CPU tests.
At least Qualcomm made real statements about release dates and those chips being really high volume. We still don't know whether or not Ice Lake will be in just a few laptops.
Andrei Frumusanu - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
The 855 preview contained almost our whole test suite, with just the thermal GPU tests missing due to lack of time.> It was not until Andrei compared the 855 to the Kirin 980 when we saw the Kirin to be slightly faster and more efficient in pure CPU tests.
This was included in the preview, and not later:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13786/snapdragon-85...
The S10 review essentially had no changes on those numbers.
Valantar - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
brakdoo: your stance here is nonsense. You're arguing that it's _more_ problematic to accept special access to do your own independent testing than it is to simply accept a company's marketing statements in good faith? That makes _zero_ sense, and is certainly not how journalism is supposed to work. Articles like this are very valuable as they give interested readers information that can be trusted to a certain degree (even if the test platform isn't what they're going to be buying in the future), unlike marketing statements which always have some spin.Ian: Excellent article, and good job getting all that work done in just eight hours. Keep up the good work.
FunBunny2 - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
"Now 5G is just sub-6 and the only important part is massive MIMO"cute. I've been, ever since 5G was a twinkle in the eye of whoever, that mmWave 5G was, and always will be, vaporware. getting it to work in the real world, when engineers and scientists have known for decades how microwave (and near) propagates, is a non-starter. the telecom BS has reached ever new highs.
Eletriarnation - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
This seems like a good thing to me - we're getting useful information earlier, even if it is limited in scope. It's not like AMD offered the same and you turned them down. Keep up the good work!