Intel NUC 13 Pro Arena Canyon Review: Raptor Lake Brings Incremental Gains

System Performance: Multi-Tasking

One of the key drivers of advancements in computing systems is multi-tasking. On mobile devices, this is quite lightweight - cases such as background email checks while the user is playing a mobile game are quite common. Towards optimizing user experience in those types of scenarios, mobile SoC manufacturers started integrating heterogeneous CPU cores - some with high performance for demanding workloads, while others were frugal in terms of both power consumption / die area and performance. This trend is now slowly making its way into the desktop PC space.

Multi-tasking in typical PC usage is much more demanding compared to phones and tablets. Desktop OSes allow users to launch and utilize a large number of demanding programs simultaneously. Responsiveness is dictated largely by the OS scheduler allowing different tasks to move to the background. Intel's Alder Lake processors work closely with the Windows 11 thread scheduler to optimize performance in these cases. Keeping these aspects in mind, the evaluation of multi-tasking performance is an interesting subject to tackle.

We have augmented our systems benchmarking suite to quantitatively analyze the multi-tasking performance of various platforms. The evaluation involves triggering a ffmpeg transcoding task to transform 1716 3840x1714 frames encoded as a 24fps AVC video (Blender Project's 'Tears of Steel' 4K version) into a 1080p HEVC version in a loop. The transcoding rate is monitored continuously. One complete transcoding pass is allowed to complete before starting the first multi-tasking workload - the PCMark 10 Extended bench suite. A comparative view of the PCMark 10 scores for various scenarios is presented in the graphs below. Also available for concurrent viewing are scores in the normal case where the benchmark was processed without any concurrent load, and a graph presenting the loss in performance

All PCMark 10 workload components see the relative ordering being maintained even after the addition of the concurrent loading.

Following the completion of the PCMark 10 benchmark, a short delay is introduced prior to the processing of Principled Technologies WebXPRT4 on MS Edge. Similar to the PCMark 10 results presentation, the graph below show the scores recorded with the transcoding load active. Available for comparison are the dedicated CPU power scores and a measure of the performance loss.

Despite a 50% performance loss, the NUC13ANKi7 retains a signficant lead over the other systems in webXPRT4 in the presence of the transcoding workload.

The final workload tested as part of the multitasking evaluation routine is CINEBENCH R23.

We see a 60%+ drop in the single thread case, and a 40%+ drop for the multi-threaded case, but the raw numbers are still well in favor of the NUC13ANKi7.

The latest version of Windows 11 (22H2) apparently has some additional thread scheduling improvements that can help Alder Lake and Raptor Lake deliver better / more balanced performance for multi-tasking scenarios. We may get a chance to evaluate that a few quarters down the line.