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.
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KOneJ - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
Bingo.Spunjji - Tuesday, January 29, 2019 - link
Truly magnificent.KateH - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
but please, if OP is interested in taking a whack at "articulating" i'd love to see what that looks like and how my translation faredMidwayman - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Interesing. So Basically no real possibility for desktop improvement until 2020 at least. They really are giving AMD a huge window to take the performance crown. Zen 2 is due to ship this year, right?BigMamaInHouse - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
And dont forget- there are many Dual/Quad core (lets Say from Q6600 ~SandyBridge to 7700K ) Intel PC's that gonna be upgraded finally with new Ryzen launch and those PC won't we upgraded for another 3+ Years,DanNeely - Sunday, January 27, 2019 - link
The lower end of that range has been upgrading for years. The upper end has no real reason to upgrade unless they're doing something other than gaming, since current games don't benefit from the higher core counts much.I'm in the middle with a 4790K; and still see myself on track for a nominal 2022 upgrade; short of games growing CPU demands significantly or unexpected hardware failures I don't see any need to bring it forward. The additional cores will be nice for future proofing; but what I'm mostly looking forward to is all the stuff outside the CPU.
My notional want list is 10GB ethernet, PCIe4(5?) to the GPU and SSD, 50/50 USB 3.x A/C mix, and DDR5. The first of these is starting to show up on halo priced mobos.
PCIe4 is rumored to be launching this year on AMD, although from the leaks so far it's not clear if it'll only reach the first x16 slot for the GPU or be more widely available (maximum trace lengths are short enough that anything other than M.2 on a not-dimm will probably need signal boosters increasing costs).
Dual USB-C is starting to show up on a few boards; but widerspread availability is likely to be blocked until the hardware to handle flipping the connector moves from a separate chip into the chipset itself.
DDR5 is supposed to start shipping in very limited quantities this year, but will be another year or two before reaching consumer devices.
My guess is late 2020/early 2021 before all the hardware I want is finally available; which fits well with the nominal 8y lifespan I'm targeting for my systems core components.
shadowx360 - Friday, February 1, 2019 - link
What is the point of DDR5? It's going to be beyond overpriced at launch for negligible performance gain. As for USB-C, you can find cases with front connectors.Gondalf - Friday, January 25, 2019 - link
Ask to TSMC, we have not any real date of shipment. Moreover we don't know how the new SKUs will perform.eastcoast_pete - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
I don't think TSMC would give anybody except their customer (AMD) an expected shipping date. Also, while we don't know how the new AMD processors will perform, we already know that I Intel's 10 nm tech was both late and hasn't performed so we'll. BTW, I am currently running all PCs around me on Intel chips, so no fanboy here. This disappointing 10 nm fiasco is bad for all of us, as we need Intel to egg on AMD and vice versa. If one of them drops behind, the other one gets lazy.eastcoast_pete - Saturday, January 26, 2019 - link
Damn autocorrect and no edit!