Office Performance

The dynamics of CPU Turbo modes, both Intel and AMD, can add a wrinkle to testing in environments with a variable threaded workload. There is also an added issue of the motherboard remaining consistent, depending on how the motherboard manufacturer wants to add in their own boosting technologies over the ones that Intel would prefer they used. In order to remain consistent, we implement an OS-level unique high performance mode on all the CPUs we test which should override any motherboard manufacturer performance mode.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

Dolphin Benchmark: link

Many emulators are often bound by single-threaded CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant boost to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that raytraces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in minutes, where the Wii itself scores 17.53 minutes.

Dolphin Emulation Benchmark

Crystal Well doesn’t help much in Dolphin, indicating it is more CPU frequency limited than DRAM/cache limited.

WinRAR 5.0.1: link

Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.

WinRAR 5.01, 2867 files, 1.52 GB

WinRAR is our typical benchmark to go to when testing whether DRAM is factor, and the improvements provided by the Crystal Well implementation trump any frequency deficit.

3D Particle Movement

3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores.

3D Particle Movement: Single Threaded

3D Particle Movement: MultiThreaded

3DPM, like Dolphin, is concerned more with CPU frequency than DRAM accesses.

FastStone Image Viewer 4.9

FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and results are given in seconds.

FastStone Image Viewer 4.9

Web Benchmarks

On the lower end processors, general usability is a big factor of experience, especially as we move into the HTML5 era of web browsing.  For our web benchmarks, we take four well known tests with Chrome 35 as a consistent browser.

Mozilla Kraken 1.1

Kraken 1.1

WebXPRT

WebXPRT

Google Octane v2

Google Octane v2

In the webtests, the Broadwell-DT CPUs didn’t necessarily take top spot but they are punching above their expected weight for their frequency.

Intel Broadwell Test Setup, Power Consumption Professional Performance: Windows
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  • Peichen - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link

    Intel is ridiculous in what way? You know Skylake is out in 2 months and that's why you are waiting for it. If you think Skylake isn't going to deliver why bother to wait? Intel haven't failed to deliver since Pentium M unlike AMD which is just one dropped ball after another. Sit tight and is gamers will have Skylake in no time. Today's release is for system builders that need a stopgap product, not us.
  • Khenglish - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link

    Why is the L3 cache only 6MB? Is 2MB disabled, or did intel cut the L3 size to reduce latencies since there is now an L4?
  • Ryan Smith - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link

    i5 processors typically have some of their L3 cache disabled.
  • HollyDOL - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link

    First time in years I am not sure what to think about this new cpu... Is it good? Is it delivering? On some things it quite rocks, on other seems like unfinished product/partial release... guess following months will tell...
  • Valantar - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link

    Just wondering: As previous Iris Pro vs. other integrated graphics reviews have shown Iris Pro to perform substantially worse at higher resolutions, are more tests above 720p coming in part 2? Or are you just going for whatever setting gets reasonably playable frame rates?
  • sonicmerlin - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link

    Why the frack didn't you test a midrange card at 720p so we can compare it to Iris Pro? They can't even do 30 fps at 1080p on most of the games you tested. What were you thinking?!
  • bobhays - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link

    On the low end gaming benchmarks for GRID, when benchmarking the r7 240 the minimum FPS for the A10-7700k is higher than the average FPS which doesn't make sense.
  • bobhays - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link

    Also wish they had tested dual graphics with a r7 240. The A10 ~ 130 + r7 240 ~ 70 = 200. That way we could compare a 200 dollar APU + GPU vs Intels new 200 dollar cpu's
  • OrphanageExplosion - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link

    I've tried it with an A8 7650K and I can tell you that the frame-pacing is horrible, and the variance in frame-rate is stupendous. Crysis 3, 720p, low - 60fps looking in one direction, spin around on the spot and you're looking at 20-30fps looking in another direction.
  • ryrynz - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link

    Might wanna fix up that 128MB eDRAM comment Ian.

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