The Intel Broadwell Desktop Review: Core i7-5775C and Core i5-5675C Tested (Part 1)
by Ian Cutress on June 2, 2015 7:45 AM ESTOffice 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.
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 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.
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.
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
WebXPRT
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.
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Taneli - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
So how does it compare to 4770R?IUU - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Good , very good . Now after they have succeeded in this exercise, that is , showing they can build decent igpu, they can finally proceed to the real goal. Make a little bit weaker processors with the same igpu for real laptops, where portability but performance as well are needed at the same time.Then, throw away the burden of the i-gpu part for real desktop parts and complete the desktop series with 80 100 and 130 watts models.
Trying to persuade customers that from now on this is the high end is not going to work. The desktop
or desktop like derivatives should be at the front end of new computer challenges, none of which is
what we describe today as consumer needs(with the exception of gaming of course which admit it or not will always be one of the most demanding software).
Consider that pattern recognition(be it sound video or logic-language) will demand a lot of and parallel processing. Trying to push it as a network based service will not succeed at least as it is
envisioned right now. A significant part of it should be done locally. Now take this advice and conquer or abandon it and fail lol...
bill.rookard - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
I'm not sure that they've proven they can build a decent iGPU. The whole point of integrated graphics is to provide an affordable solution with 'good enough' performance. While they have certainly hit the 'good enough' performance from both a CPU and GPU point of view, they've entirely missed the 'affordable' part of things. For the price of a single Intel CPU, you can almost get an AMD -system- which (while about 10% slower on average) is no small matter.Truth is (as pointed out) you can get an AMD chip with a $100 discrete graphics card which would blow either of the iGPUs away.
mrdude - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
That's the issue both AMD and Intel have had with respect to their iGPUs. Once you've dedicated enough of the die to GPU transistors and skirted around the memory bottleneck (at least for Intel), you end up with a product that, while offering decent GPU performance, is horrendously overpriced for what it offers. Outside of niche scenarios, these things just don't make much sense given just how performance even cheap discrete GPUs can offer.I'd like to see what Intel's margins are on these parts and how much the eDRAM adds to the overall cost of the product. If yields are good and prices aren't much higher, I'd love to see Intel 'bite the bullet' in order to replace the entire product portfolio top-to-bottom. They'd benefit massively from it with respect to market share and being taken seriously with their gaming endeavor.
Unfortunately, I don't think Intel is willing to eat lower margins and a dip in profits for a long term gain, even if it would see a bucking of the current dip in sales with uptick in systems sold.
Refuge - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
They have the best margins in the business.But of course they wont. Why lower prices, make less money now, kill AMD more, and then make more money later possibly if you don't lose out on some BS legal battle over having no compitition. Because it will happen, you know it will.
When instead you can continue to enjoy your large margins with minimal griping because the blame is being split between Intel's greed and AMD's inability to compete. Watch them die slowly, make more money while doing it. They control this playing field, why rock the boat when it is more profitable than it should be already?
Kjella - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
And an Intel chip too, I wonder who are these people who'll pay $276-366 for something that'll get totally trashed by a $64 G3260 + $2-300 discrete graphics card. I guess the target market is AIOs that value style and low power consumption over performance and cost. If you look at their laptop prices, they're the same. So I'm guessing Intel didn't want manufacturers underclocking the 65W chips and using them as cheap 47W laptop chips. And the AIO makers wouldn't like Intel releasing a socketed chip cheaper than the identical BGA chip so the price is set with no grounding to reality in the desktop market.vision33r - Tuesday, June 2, 2015 - link
Majority of people can use G3260 + a decent vid card and have no clue it's a cheap underclass cpu. i5 and i7 are just marketing ploy for clueless people to buy the top level even though they don't know where the performance bottlenecks really are.Notmyusualid - Thursday, June 4, 2015 - link
You know, two of my brothers have i5 CPUs, and my i7 utterly trounces them, in every way. I was expecting the difference to be small, but oh no, for example, one brothers' 3230M does wPrime in < 19s, my i7 < 8s.This speed difference is reflected in the way the PCs 'feels' in every way. I'd say i7's are worth the money, despite seeing some i5s offer up great benchmarks online...
If gaming, then yes, you need an actual decent gpu, but for everything else, CPU counts most...
xulmar - Saturday, June 6, 2015 - link
Are you joking? 3230M? Obviously in laptops the story is different. In desktop the i5 and i7 are comparable, as the i7's main advantage is only the HT, but they still got 4 physical cores all the same. Laptop i5s are crippled processors. If intel would offer an i5 with 4 phsyical cores at a reasonable price - i'd buy it instantly. But 2+2 cores vs 4+4 in laptop i7 is hella difference. Obviously the processor can only be half as fast in multithreaded, if its only HALF of the i7... If you care even a bit about performance in a laptop, i7 is a no brainer, and sadly Intel is pushing the prices up, and replacing the middle class with the U processors which will sadly ruin everyone's dreams about reasonably priced PC performance in the future. This leaves an opportunity for AMD, as soon a quad i7 will be unavailable in any laptop under 1000 dollars...Namisecond - Wednesday, June 3, 2015 - link
"I wonder who are these people who'll pay $276-366 for something that'll get totally trashed by a $64 G3260 + $2-300 discrete graphics card."The same people who don't treat gaming benchmarks as the sole reason for their purchase. Once you get out of gamer culture, you'll find people value (whether mistakenly or not) CPU power over GPU power. In the corporate IT world, installing that $100 discrete GPU card can cost more than the hardware alone.