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 ESTDOTA 2 Results
DOTA 2 is a multiplayer battle arena game, and for this test we are using the same setup as our Mainstream benchmark, but this time with a full game. At 1600x900, all of the devices should be around 30 fps, and the overall test is about 45 minutes.
The Core i5 once again does a great job throughout this test. The CPU frequencies are dropped to keep the GPU running at full speed. The GPU basically runs at full speed for the duration of this test. The Venue 11 Pro is not so lucky, with it quickly heating up and being forced to throttle both the CPU and the GPU. The ASUS continues its amazing run, and showcases what can happen with a good passive cooling solution. The Yoga 3 Pro is not so lucky, with that pesky 65°C set point rearing its ugly head, which causes a big drop in overall frequency on such a long sustained workload.
The average CPU frequency for this sustained real world gaming workload has even the Core i5 having to give up some CPU headroom to keep the GPU fed with power. The ASUS has a sizable advantage here, and both the 5Y71 devices drop well under their base 1.2 GHz CPU frequency when the GPU is running at maximum.
The GPU is really the story though, since this is a gaming workload. Amazingly the ASUS is only 100 MHz off of its maximum turbo frequency as an average for this 45 minute workload. Both the Dell Venue 11 Pro and the Yoga 3 Pro do not have enough cooling to keep these kinds of sustained GPU loads going.
The Yoga 3 Pro is by far the coolest SoC in almost all of these tests, with its combination of active cooling and a 65°C maximum SoC temperature. The ASUS is far and away the hottest device in this test, but it also does a lot more work than the other Core M devices, and it is not getting any hotter by the end of the test, so the device cooling is doing its job.
It is clear at this point that the ASUS can keep the GPU frequency much higher than the other Core M devices due to the nature of its cooling, and form factor. The DOTA 2 test is really dominated by it. It is much faster in this test than the other Core M devices, and once again due to the single-channel nature of the Core i5, the ASUS even outperforms the Core i5 in this test.
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serendip - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
Core M is expensive for what it does. If you want mobility without a fan, go with Atom. If you want better unthrottled performance, go with the U models.It's the weird throttling and poor OEM thermal designs which concern me. Core M may have good turbo speeds but that's useless if it has to throttle down quickly from heat soak. Users will be disappointed when their machines act speedy one moment and start lagging the next, no matter what the design turbo speeds are.
serendip - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
Can't edit comments, sigh. Anyway, my Bay Trail Atom tablet runs from 600 MHz to 1.86 GHz and has no issues with thermal throttling. It can smoothly turbo and then clock down without dropping down too far and sacrificing usability.It seems some OEMs like Lenovo set a total system power draw limit that's too low, on top of skin thermal limits. The CPU can only turbo for very short periods of time before being dropped to base speed or even lower. You're then stuck with a 1 GHz CPU and 100 MHz GPU which you paid a ton of money for. I think the problem lies with both sloppy engineering from OEMs and unrealistic promises made by Intel.
nonoverclock - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
I have a Bay Trail Atom (Venue Pro 11) and it's alright but I definitely need more speed. Trying to stream sports games through their Metro apps will often skip and this doesn't happen on my higher performance devices. Also it has some inexplicable pauses here and there. More speed would be great.Brett Howse - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
I think you are missing the fact that even throttled Broadwell is a lot faster than Silvermont cores. I don't have the T100 in the notebook bench (it is a tablet) but the HP Stream has two Silvermont cores and a 7.5 watt TDP http://anandtech.com/bench/product/1449?vs=1400If you want to compare to quad-core Bay Trail some of the scores are here http://anandtech.com/show/7428/asus-transformer-bo...
Bay Trail was a big boost for Atom but I would take Core M in a mobile device over it any day.
Pissedoffyouth - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
My bay trail Asus T100 never throttles back from 1.8ghz even under prime95+furmark. very power efficientsonicmerlin - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
I really like this article, but I wish you had run GFXBench, which is more of a pure GPU test. I want to compare the results to the iPad's A8X and Tegra K1.Brett Howse - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
I have discussed this in the actual device reviews. This article wasn't about that kind of comparison so I will ask you to go to the review http://anandtech.com/show/9104/asus-zenbook-ux305-...testbug00 - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
All this testing, and, I don't see a single power system power draw number for anything. Maybe I'm missing something? But, woudn't seeing the i5 system draw 7-13 watts more be useful for determining how good Core M is?If the product uses a third of the power and gets 50-100% of the performance... Well. That's very impressive.
Alexvrb - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
Do you like phystics? Do you like phystics in your mouth? (typo on page 2!)Brett Howse - Thursday, April 9, 2015 - link
TYVM :)