Intel 11th Generation Core Tiger Lake-H Performance Review: Fast and Power Hungry
by Brett Howse & Andrei Frumusanu on May 17, 2021 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- 10nm
- Willow Cove
- SuperFin
- 11th Gen
- Tiger Lake-H
CPU Tests: Legacy and Web
In order to gather data to compare with older benchmarks, we are still keeping a number of tests under our ‘legacy’ section. This includes all the former major versions of CineBench (R15, R11.5, R10) as well as x264 HD 3.0 and the first very naïve version of 3DPM v2.1. We won’t be transferring the data over from the old testing into Bench, otherwise it would be populated with 200 CPUs with only one data point, so it will fill up as we test more CPUs like the others.
The other section here is our web tests.
Web Tests: Kraken, Octane, and Speedometer
Benchmarking using web tools is always a bit difficult. Browsers change almost daily, and the way the web is used changes even quicker. While there is some scope for advanced computational based benchmarks, most users care about responsiveness, which requires a strong back-end to work quickly to provide on the front-end. The benchmarks we chose for our web tests are essentially industry standards – at least once upon a time.
It should be noted that for each test, the browser is closed and re-opened a new with a fresh cache. We use a fixed Chromium version for our tests with the update capabilities removed to ensure consistency.
Mozilla Kraken 1.1
Kraken is a 2010 benchmark from Mozilla and does a series of JavaScript tests. These tests are a little more involved than previous tests, looking at artificial intelligence, audio manipulation, image manipulation, json parsing, and cryptographic functions. The benchmark starts with an initial download of data for the audio and imaging, and then runs through 10 times giving a timed result.
We loop through the 10-run test four times (so that’s a total of 40 runs), and average the four end-results. The result is given as time to complete the test, and we’re reaching a slow asymptotic limit with regards the highest IPC processors.
Google Octane 2.0
Our second test is also JavaScript based, but uses a lot more variation of newer JS techniques, such as object-oriented programming, kernel simulation, object creation/destruction, garbage collection, array manipulations, compiler latency and code execution.
Octane was developed after the discontinuation of other tests, with the goal of being more web-like than previous tests. It has been a popular benchmark, making it an obvious target for optimizations in the JavaScript engines. Ultimately it was retired in early 2017 due to this, although it is still widely used as a tool to determine general CPU performance in a number of web tasks.
Speedometer 2: JavaScript Frameworks
Our newest web test is Speedometer 2, which is a test over a series of JavaScript frameworks to do three simple things: built a list, enable each item in the list, and remove the list. All the frameworks implement the same visual cues, but obviously apply them from different coding angles.
Our test goes through the list of frameworks, and produces a final score indicative of ‘rpm’, one of the benchmarks internal metrics.
We repeat over the benchmark for a dozen loops, taking the average of the last five.
Legacy Tests
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ozzuneoj86 - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
While it is nice that it supports gen 4, realistically you're just getting SSDs that put out more heat, with more power draw, while gaining performance benefits that are only measurable in benchmarks or very specific situations.I'm sure file copy performance is much higher, but how fast do you need that to be? Assuming you're copying to the drive itself or maybe to a Thunderbolt 4 external drive, it is the difference between copying 1TB of data in 2 minutes versus 6 minutes. You can (theoretically) completely fill a $400 2TB SSD in 4 minutes with gen4 vs maybe 12 minutes with Gen 3. If someone needs to do that all the time, then sure there's a difference... but that has to be pretty uncommon.
For smaller amounts of data, any decent nvme drive is fast enough to make the difference between models almost unnoticeable. For the vast majority of users, even a SATA drive is plenty fast enough to provide a smooth and nearly wait-free experience.
mode_13h - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
> realistically you're just getting SSDs that put out more heat, with more power draw,> while gaining performance benefits that are only measurable in benchmarks
> or very specific situations.
Exactly. Thank you.
mode_13h - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
> Assuming you're copying to the drive itself or maybe to a Thunderbolt 4 external driveOops! TB 4 is limited to PCIe 3.0 x4 speeds! So, it'd be little-to-no help there!
Calin - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
Well, you could copy full blast to an external drive and have plenty of remaining performance to do other storage intensive things - that's assuming your external drives is fast enough to suffocate PCIe 3.0 x4, and your internal drive is faster still.mode_13h - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link
> Well, you could copy full blast to an external drive and have plenty of remaining performanceI'm not one to turn down "free" performance, but PCIe 4 uses significantly more power. In a laptop, that's not a minor point.
inighthawki - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
Sequential read and write speeds are basically just flexing. Very few people actually ever make significant use of such speeds in a way that saves more than a second or two here or there. Most laptop users are not sitting there copying a terabyte of sequential data over and over again.The_Assimilator - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
There is no laptop chassis on the market that can adequately handle the excess of 8W of heat that a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD can dissipate.Cooe - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
You're not getting those kind of speeds sustained in a laptop without RIDICULOUS thermal throttling. PCIe 4.0 in mobile atm is just a marketing checkmark & nothing more.Calin - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
It allows faster "races to sleep" for the processor. And, since the Core2 architecture, the winning move was "fast and power hungry processor that does what it must and then goes to a very low power state". This gives you very good burst speed and low average power - as soon as you finish, you can throttle everything down (CPU, caches, SSDs, ...)mode_13h - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link
> It allows faster "races to sleep" for the processor.Are we still talking about PCIe 4? I don't think it works like that.
> since the Core2 architecture, the winning move was "fast and power hungry processor that does what it must and then goes to a very low power state".
No, it's more energy-efficient to run at a slower clock speed. There's a huge difference between the amount of energy used in turbo and non-turbo modes. As it's far bigger than the performance difference, there's no way that going to idle a little sooner is going to make up for it.