A Broadwell Retrospective Review in 2020: Is eDRAM Still Worth It?
by Dr. Ian Cutress on November 2, 2020 11:00 AM ESTGaming Tests: Chernobylite
Despite the advent of recent TV shows like Chernobyl, recreating the situation revolving around the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the concept of nuclear fallout and the town of Pripyat have been popular settings for a number of games – mostly first person shooters. Chernobylite is an indie title that plays on a science-fiction survival horror experience and uses a 3D-scanned recreation of the real Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. It involves challenging combat, a mix of free exploration with crafting and non-linear story telling. While still in early access, it is already picking up plenty of awards.
I picked up Chernobylite while still in early access, and was impressed by its in-game benchmark, showcasing complex building structure with plenty of trees and structures where aliasing becomes important. The in-game benchmark is an on-rails experience through the scenery, covering both indoor and outdoor scenes – it ends up being very CPU limited in the way it is designed. We have taken an offline version of Chernobylite to use in our tests, and we are testing the following settings combinations:
- 360p Low, 1440p Low, 4K Low, 1080p Max
We do as many runs within 10 minutes per resolution/setting combination, and then take averages.
| AnandTech | Low Res Low Qual |
Medium Res Low Qual |
High Res Low Qual |
Medium Res Max Qual |
| Average FPS |  |
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The Broadwell CPUs remain high performers here as the frame rates get cranked up, with the Broadwell Core i7+i5 even matching the latest Comet Lake Core i5, even at 1080p Max settings.
For our Integrated Tests, we run the first and last combination of settings.
Integrated graphics shows how far AMD's basic options are ahead.
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Khenglish - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
The infinity cache is SRAM, which will be faster but much lower density. Only IBM ever integrated DRAM on the same die as a processor. The DRAM capacitor takes up the space where you want to put all your CPU wiring.Quantumz0d - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Always thought why Intel is so fucking foolish in making that shitty iGPU die instead of making eDRAM on the chip. It would have given a massive boost for all their CPUs. A big missed opportunity. AMD had this "Game cache" on their Zen 2 and now with RDNA2, "Infinity Cache" again..jospoortvliet - Wednesday, November 4, 2020 - link
I guess they did the math on cost and power. They always had better memory controllers and prefetchers so they didn't benefit as much from cache- they also have the memory controller on-die, unlike amd with their i/o die. So intel would benefit waaaay less than amd does, in almost every way.dragosmp - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
"...the same 22nm eDRAM chip is still in use today with Apple's 2020 base Macbook Pro 13"Ahem, what? Is that CPU an off the roadmap Tiger Lake?
Jorgp2 - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Tiger Lake doesn't have the hardware for an L4.It's probably the Skylake version
colinisation - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Do the part numbers on Intel CPU's mean anything, I picked up a 5775C a week agoand have not installed it yet but the part number starts "L523" - I just assume it is a later batch than what is in the review.ilt24 - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
@colinisationThat L523 are the first 4 characters of the is the Finished Process Order or Batch#.
The L says it was packaged in Malaysia
The 5 says it was packaged in 2015
The 23 says it was packaged on the 23rd week
Digits 5-8 are the specific lot number number of the wafer the die came from
colinisation - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
@ilt24 - Thank you very muchMday - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
I expected more eDRAM implementations after Broadwell coming from Intel and AMD on the CPU side, as a low latency - high "capacity" cache, particularly after the launch of HBM. It made me wonder why Intel even bothered, or what shifts in strategies moved them to and away from eDRAM.ichaya - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
This is really the first desktop part I'm hearing of, weren't most of these "Iris Pro" chips sold in Apple laptops with maybe a small minority being sold by other laptop OEMs? I believe so.