Intel's 10nm Cannon Lake and Core i3-8121U Deep Dive Review
by Ian Cutress on January 25, 2019 10:30 AM ESTCPU Performance: SPEC2006 at 2.2 GHz
Aside from power, the other question is if the Cannon Lake microarchitecture is an efficient design. For most code paths, it holds the same core design elements as Skylake and Kaby Lake, and it does have additional optimizations for certain instructions, as we detailed earlier in this review. In order to do a direct IPC comparison, we are running SPEC2006 Speed on both of our comparison points at a fixed frequency of 2.2 GHz.
In order to get a fixed frequency on our chips required adjusting the relevant registers to disable the turbo modes. There is no setting in the BIOS to do this, but thankfully the folks at AIDA64 have a tool to do this and it works great. Choosing these two processors that both have a base frequency of 2.2 GHz make this a lot easier.
SPEC2006 is a series of industry standard tests designed to help differentiate performance levels between different architectures, microarchitectures, and compilers. All official submitted results from OEMs and manufacturers are posted online for comparison, and many vendors try and get the best results. From our perspective, these workloads are very well known, which enables a good benchmark for IPC analysis.
Credit for arranging the benchmarks goes completely to our resident Senior Mobile Editor, Andrei Frumusanu, who developed a suitable harness and framework to generate the relevant binaries for both mobile and PC. On PC, we run SPEC2006 through the Windows Subsystem for Linux – we still need to do testing for overhead (we’ll do it with SPEC2017 when Andrei is ready), but for the purposes of this test today, comparing like for like both under WSL is a valid comparison. Andrei compiled SPEC2006 for AVX2 instructions, using Clang 8. We run SPEC2006 Speed, which runs one copy of each test on one thread, of all the integer tests as well as the C++ based floating point tests.
Here are our results:
| SPEC2006 Speed (Estimated Results)* |
|||||
| Intel Core i3-8121U 10nm Cannon Lake |
AnandTech | Intel Core i3-8130U 14nm Kaby Lake |
|||
| Integer Workloads | |||||
| 24.8 | 400.perlbench | 26.1 | |||
| 16.6 | 401.bzip2 | 16.8 | |||
| 27.6 | 403.gcc | 27.3 | |||
| 25.9 | 429.mcf | 28.4 | |||
| 19.0 | 445.gobmk | 19.1 | |||
| 23.5 | 456.hmmr | 23.1 | |||
| 22.2 | 458.sjeng | 22.4 | |||
| 70.5 | 462.libquantum | 75.4 | |||
| 39.7 | 464.h264ref | 37.2 | |||
| 17.5 | 471.omnetpp | 18.2 | |||
| 14.2 | 473.astar | 14.1 | |||
| 27.1 | 483.xalancbmk | 28.4 | |||
| Floating Point Workloads | |||||
| 24.6 | 433.milc | 23.8 | |||
| 23.0 | 444.namd | 23.0 | |||
| 39.1 | 450.soplex | 37.3 | |||
| 34.1 | 453.povray | 33.5 | |||
| 59.9 | 470.lbm | 68.4 | |||
| 43.2 | 482.sphinx3 | 44.2 | |||
* SPEC rules dictate that any results not verified on the SPEC website are called 'estimated results', as they have not been verified.
By and large, we actually get parity between both processors on almost all the tests. The Kaby Lake processor seems to have a small advantage in libquantum and lbm, which are SIMD related, which could be limited by the memory latency difference shown on the previous page.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
129 Comments
View All Comments
Gondalf - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
For now they have nothing out in cpu departement, so i don't see any AMD bright year in front of us.I remember you we are already in 2019.
vegajf51 - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Icelake Desktop 3q 2020, intel will have another 14nm refresh before then.HStewart - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
Intel is expected to release 10nm+ with Covey Lake by Christmas seasons. This canon lake chip is just a test chip.pugster - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Thanks for the review. While the performance is not great, what about the power consumption compared with the 8130U?Yorgos - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
it's not great obviously when you are stuck at 2.2GHz, while the prev gen cpu with the same capabilities(except the avx) can go up to 3.4GHz.I bet the 8130 would've been faster even if configured at 10Watt TDP.
Yorgos - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
...and before jumping on me about that "stuck at 2.2GHz" let me report this:in certain loads the locked freq is slower than the unlocked one.
What does this mean? it most probably means that the unlocked freq makes the cpu run hot, throttle and then try to balance between temperature and consumption.
and a subnote on this. I think Intel should stop pushing the AVX instructions. It doesn't work as intended, it's not needed in most cases, especially when you have to design 256bit buses for 512bit data transfer on a low power cpu. Also it takes a lot of space on the die, it taxes the cache buses and it's useless when you disable your igpu(which is a good SIMD machine but not hUMA) and you have a dGPU up all the time just rendering your desktop.
They should try focusing on HSA/hUMA on their cpus+igpus instead of integrating wide SIMD instructions inside their cores.
0ldman79 - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
Thing is when AVX2 and AVX512 are used the performance increase can be rather massive.PCSX2, PS2 emulator, runs identically between my 3.9GHz Ivy Bridge Xeon (AVX) and my 2.8GHz i5 Skylake mobile (AVX2).
AVX2 makes several games playable. You can choose your plugin and the AVX plugin cannot play Gran Turismo 4 @ 2.8GHz, the AVX2 plugin can.
You may not find it useful, others do.
HStewart - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
It would be interesting to see the emulator re-factor to work with AVX 512 - it would like be twice the speed of AVX 2levizx - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
Nope, even with the simplest data set where AVX512 can perform twice the speed of AVX2 per cycle, the frequency has to drop significantly (~30% on Xeon Gold 5120 for example), so the upper limit is more like 40% gain. And that's PURE AVX512 code, you won't get that in real life. Assuming 50% AVX2 and 50% AVX512 code - that's a very generous assumption for non-datacentre usage, you'll have a 5% net gain.levizx - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
5%~20% net gain, depending on how the scaling works.