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 ESTPCMark 8 Home Results
PCMark 8 Home is a much different workload than Cinebench. Cinebench thrives on sustained performance over the duration of the workload, with the CPU utilization staying around 100% for the duration. While an important metric, most people do not use their computers like that in their day to day lives, so Futuremark has crafted the PCMark suite to perform tasks which are more akin to what the average person will do in a day. Home includes workloads for web browsing, writing, gaming, photo editing, and video chat, and the nature of these loads mean that there is a lot more burst performance needed, so the race to sleep mentality of the Core M can be more effective in this scenario.
The burst nature of this benchmark is apparent just looking at the Core i5. No longer is the CPU frequency consistent across the board, and the temperatures ramp up and down as the work is performed and finished. Even more pronounced is the Dell tablet, which spikes up and down from its maximum temperature, but at the same time ramping clock speeds up quite high as well. The incredible cooling of the ASUS UX305 passive solution makes a big difference here, with the UX305 being able to maintain almost its maximum frequency for the duration of this benchmark. The Yoga 3 Pro really shines here though, with it maintaining quite high speeds for almost the entire duration of the benchmark.
Average CPU frequencies on the other hand show an unexpected disparity between the results we saw above and what the averages end up being. It's the cool Yoga 3 Pro that holds the highest average clockspeeds, followed by the UX305, and finally bringing up the rear is the Venure 11 Pro 7000.
The GPU averages for the three Core M devices are very similar overall, although none are at their maximum. Only the 15 watt Core i5 can maintain its maximum GPU frequency for the duration of this test. As we will see later, GPUs can draw a lot of power.
Moving on to temperature, with the burst nature of this benchmark, all of the devices have a reasonable time to cool off between workloads. The ASUS shows its amazing cooling capabilities again, with a significantly lower temperature than even both of the active cooled devices, but none of them are too close to their maximum allowed temperature over the duration.
Looking at the end result of this benchmark kind of throws everything we have seen in the above graphs on its head. The Yoga 3 Pro, despite sustaining a CPU frequency higher than all of the other Core M devices in this test, ends up scoring the worst, however the overall result by the Yoga 3 Pro is disadvantaged in this benchmark by the gaming test, due to the high resolution display on the Yoga 3 Pro. This is very similar to the results seen in the Dell XPS 13 review, where the QHD+ model only scored 2691 and the FHD model scored 3042 with the same processor. However the ASUS UX305 beats the other Core M devices, although it does so with a much lower resolution display than the Yoga 3 Pro which would certainly beat it otherwise.
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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 :)