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
Conclusions
First of all, I must say that Intel offering us to test a reference system in advance of a launch is a very good thing indeed. It is not something that Intel has done often in the past – in fact the last time I remember it happening was with Broadwell, when Intel sampled us one of their mobile CRB (consumer reference board) systems for the 45W chip. Before that, Intel had a small attempt allowing the press to benchmark Conroe in 2006 with canned pre-provided benchmarks, which did not go down to well. So moving into this pre-testing regime gets some immediate kudos to those who approved the testing.
Intel’s Broadwell / Crystalwell Mobile CRB
Given that the Ice Lake platform is more geared up towards ultra-premium designs, the software development system we ended up testing was certainly a reasonable expectation and direction that these parts would go in. Of course, we only had the best part of nine hours to test, and giving us the option to test both 15W and 25W modes meant we had to pick and choose what tests we thought were relevant. My most prominent feedback to Intel would be to give us two days to test next time, as it allows us to sit on our data after day one and decide what to do next. It was clear that some of the press in attendance only needed a day (or half a day), but for what we do at AT, then two days would be better.
As for Ice Lake itself, our results lean towards Ice Lake outperforming Whiskey Lake, if only by a small margin.
To preface this, I want to recall a graph that Intel showed off at Computex:
This graph shows the single thread performance of Skylake and beyond, compared to 5th Gen Broadwell hardware. Right at the very end, we see Whiskey Lake performing +42% above Broadwell, and Ice Lake performing +47% above Broadwell. A quick calculation of 1.47/1.42 means that even Intel is only predicting an absolute gain of ~3.5% for Ice Lake over current generation systems.
The reason why the difference is so small is because of IPC and frequency. Intel is touting a median IPC advantage on the new Sunny Cove cores of +18% against Skylake. That isn’t something we were able to test in the short time we had with the system, but +18% should provide a healthy bump – we actually see a number of key microarchitectural improvements bubble up through in our SPEC testing.
But at the same time, the frequency has decreased – our Whiskey Lake Huawei Matebook system was +500 MHz on the base frequency (+38%), and +700 MHz on the turbo frequency (+18%). If it were not for the vast increase in memory speed, moving from LPDDR3-2133 to LPDDR4X-3733, one might have predicted that the Core i7-1065G7 Ice Lake processor and the Core i7-8565U Whisky Lake processor would have performed equally.
The question here then becomes whether you prefer IPC or frequency. For instruction limited tasks, that answer should be IPC. For critical path limited tasks, you nominally require frequency. All this gets muddled a bit with the increased memory frequency, but with higher IPC at lower frequency, you should arguably be more power efficient as well, leading to longer battery life. At iso-performance between Ice and Whiskey, considering no other factors like price, I would choose Ice.
Intel has made a number of improvements to a chunk of the instruction set that should work well for users, however the new bigger cache design has added a bit of latency there, which ends up being a bit of give and take with cache hits and misses.
Of course, the one area where Ice Lake excels in is graphics. Moving from 24 EUs to 64 EUs, plus an increase in memory bandwidth to >50 GB/s, makes for some easy reading. It gets even better in 25W mode, for games that are CPU limited, but still don’t expect to be tackling AAA games at high resolutions. Despite Ice Lake being focused on the ultra-premium >1080p resolution market, you will still be gaming at 720p or 1080p at best here.
The other alternative is to attach a Thunderbolt 3 external graphics card. If there’s one really good add-in to Ice Lake, aside from the graphics uplift, it’s the inclusion of up to four TB3 ports as part of the CPU silicon. If and when the TB3 controllers get a lot cheaper on the device side, this should really help accelerate a high-performance standard here.
We should also talk about AVX-512 – Intel is in a position right now where including it in the chip uses a good amount of die area, and the software ecosystem hasn’t yet adopted it. By advertising speed-ups like DLBoost, the company is hoping to entice developers to work with AVX-512 in mind, and improve a number of machine learning applications for consumer processors. The other side there is what sort of consumer applications need machine learning that isn’t already done in the cloud. It’s a bit of a catch-22, but in our own testing, the AVX-512 does provide a significant speed-up. However, given Intel’s recent mantra of testing for user experience, it will be interesting to see how hammering the AVX-512 unit meshes with that mantra.
The scope of when these Ice Lake processors are coming to market, and how much, is still a question mark. Intel states that we’ll see Ice Lake in the market for the holiday season (i.e. Christmas), however we have a number of trade shows around the corner, such as IFA in September, where me might start seeing some companies start to show off their designs. We also know that Intel plans to release Comet Lake mobile processors sometime this year, on the old 14nm process and old Skylake-based microarchitecture, but at higher frequencies, so it will be interesting to see how they compete.
Final Thoughts
I’m glad to have tested Ice Lake. It’s a shame that we only had a day to test, because I could have spent a week testing that system. Increasing IPC is the best problem to solve, even if it gives similar performance due to a lower frequency, but hopefully the knock on effect here will be better battery life for users at the same performance. Once we get some systems in to test that battery life, and Project Athena’s requirement of 16+ hours comes to the front, I think we’ll see the best examples of Ice Lake shine through.
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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!