Analyzing Intel Core M Performance: How 5Y10 can beat 5Y71 & the OEMs' Dilemma
by Brett Howse & Ian Cutress on April 8, 2015 8:00 AM EST3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited Results
Ice Storm Unlimited is quite a bit different than the last two benchmarks. The test is built for smartphones and tablets, so is far less demanding than the other GPU benchmarks. There are two GPU tests, and a physics test, and as you will see in the graphs, when those workloads are occurring is very obvious. The overall benchmark is quite short though, which allows the devices that have more thermal issues, but higher overall turbo frequencies, to keep the frequencies up much more. It is basically the equivalent of a CPU burst workload, except mostly run on the GPU.
The Core i5 does not even flinch at this workload, even leveraging its turbo when needed. The Venue 11 Pro is the most interesting graph because it so clearly defines when the actual work is happening. Because the duration is so short, it is able to turbo quite high, and the GPU frequencies are not throttled too much. The ASUS does have to throttle the CPU to keep the GPU frequency up on this test. The Yoga 3 Pro shows quite a strong result in this very short test.
Looking at the average CPU speeds, the Yoga 3 Pro jumps way out in front. The Venue 11 Pro is quite far behind, but as you can see in the graphs, when the work was required, it did have thermal headroom available to turbo.
On the GPU front, the Yoga 3 Pro is almost at the same average as the Core i5 in this test, as both have the same base and turbo frequencies. The Venue 11 is only a bit behind, and the ASUS falls to third due to the 100 MHz frequency deficit that the 5Y10 has on the GPU compared to the 5Y71 processor.
On the SoC temperature side, none of the devices struggle with temperature on such a short test.
On such a short test, the Core M devices all do very well, and the fastest Core M model in the Yoga 3 Pro tops this GPU test. It is quite a bit in front of the rest of the devices, showing that with active cooling, it can still get a lot of work done in a short amount of time. Remember that the Core i5 Dell Latitude is the only device with single-channel memory, which hurts it most in the GPU tests and explains why it is below the Core M devices despite much higher average frequencies for both the CPU and GPU.
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zepi - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
Surface pro 3 is ~50% thicker than iPad Air 2, weights ~50% more, has active cooling and still has poorer performance than Surface Pro 2.From my point of view Surface pro 3 proves that Haswell-U can't power ultra-thin x86 tablets.
lilmoe - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
Didn't know the iPad was an ultra-thin x86 tablet that replace your laptop. Good to know, thanks.I get that the iPad has a huge fan base, I really do. But would you guys please stop comparing it to real PCs in tablet form already??
zepi - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
Central argument proposed was that SP3 somehow proves that Haswell-U can power ultra-thin X86 tablets. There were no mentions about Windows or OSX compatibility in original statement.Keyword is Tablet. x86, ultra-thin etc. are describe terms. You don't need to go far and see that the statement is clearly false. Ultra-thin in context of tablets means these days that thickness of the device should to be somewhere around 6-7mm. SP3 is 9mm. I picked iPad Air 2, because it is the most well known of competitors. We could just as well use Dell Venue 8. Ipad thickness is 6.1 and Dell is 6mm thick. Later is even x86 and runs windows
Weight was another thing. Naturally comparing weight to Venue 8 makes very little sense since SP3 has over twice the total screen area of Venue 8 so I compare it with iPad air 2, which has the biggest screen area of the most well known tablets in the market. Most certainly, there are some less well known 12" models, but they are not widely spread and have hardly any market penetration.
I cannot see how SP3 would prove that 15w TDP allows for compact tablet designs. SP3 is already thermally limited and mostly proves to me that in order to reach smaller and thinner designs, lower power SOC's are necessary. From my point of view SP3 is full computer which offers decent (though arguably best in class) tablet usability in addition of being dockable general purpose PC-computer.
digiguy - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
come on, you change the comparison in the same sentence, SP3 is thinner and lighter than SP2, and has has higher res screen. As for ipad air, try to run Windows on it....Jaybus - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
Or even if it ran OSX. The iPad is a giant iPhone. If it ran OSX, then we could compare it to SP3. For now, iPad can only be compared to Android tablets.xthetenth - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
Being thicker than slower devices and slower than thicker devices only proves that it fits between them on a size/performance scale and does nothing to show that it's not a good device.ppi - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
My desktop is also thicker than iPaid Air2, weighs more, has active cooling and certainly eats more power. So ... ?You have to realize, that this 4.5W chip actually has performance that is in league with 15W chip. For many ultrabook/2-in-1 use cases ideal chip. And read the Yoga3 review, where on CPU-bound benchmarks, Core-M runs circles around A8X.
frozentundra123456 - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
I agree with some of the other posters. The problem is the price of these devices for the performance. I can see them for say business use, where the company is paying, use is light, and mobility is important (say for a sales rep who travels a lot), but otherwise, I cant see Joe Average Consumer paying north of 1000 for these when you can get similar perrformance for less in a 350.00 conventional laptop or less performance, but still decent in a 100 to 300 dollar atom device.xthetenth - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
The ASUS is in the 700 dollar range and avoids a great many other compromises cheaper devices would make. It fits into the price/quality scale very nicely.zepi - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
From gaming / usability perspective the average-results do not necessarily tell enough.Ie. does the usage experience of certain devices suffer because GPU / CPU throttles too much under certain loads?
Are the bottom 10% frametimes so horrendous on throttling devices that DOTA-gaming is practically out of question despite relatively small difference in average frame rates?