"As for Ice Lake itself, our results lean towards Ice Lake outperforming Whiskey Lake, if only by a small margin."
A laptop allowing more than 50W on a U chip and with cooler always running is certainly not representative of the real world performance a user would get from real systems. If Whiskey Lake results were obtained on a real system, then the results are not comparable enough that Ice Lake can actually be slower, especially in real world loads (note the performance on x264 and POV-Ray essentially has not changed). But at least iGPU has improved nicely.
They have dedicated pages to 15w and 25w results. Not sure what you're on about about 'allowing more than 50W...' when they power limited the chip for specific-scenario benchmark results.
You may want to re-read that Power Results section - put simply, peevee's point still stands and your response is mistaken. At the 25W limit, the CPU spent more than 20 seconds operating between 50W and 35W before it finally dropped down. It's unlikely that the Coffee / Whiskey devices they tested allowed that sort of behaviour, as without a continuous 100% fan speed the thermals would have spiked and lowered the power limit far sooner. Even with the "power limits" you're talking about in place, the chip still boosts like that, so their benchmark results incorporate that behaviour. for any other company I might feel generously inclined, but Intel have already pulled a fast one multiple times by releasing CPUs that have nominally higher specifications but never reach their performance potential in shipping designs due to thermal constraints.
There is no evidence that the iGPU has improved. We'd need a comparison against Iris Plus 655 to confirm that. We only know EUs have increased (64 vs 48) but EDRAM was removed.
I'm encouraging the behaviour. I've been on at Intel to do something like this for a while. I'm giving credit where credit is due. As always with events like this companies like Intel have PR saying they want to do something, and the legal side of the equation resisting. If we get more opportunities like this in the future, it helps us provide a richer content base in advance of a product launch - people get to prepare in case they're in the mood for a purchase.
Also, tell me if you say the same things on our Qualcomm QRD testing. Please.
You are just trying to get an edge over other sites but you are just being played.
It's the same BS with Qualcomm and their mmWave BS that has been spread by sites like this. Now 5G is just sub-6 and the only important part is massive MIMO
We do our own validation of the platform to remove as much Intel involvement as possible. Also, if Intel went ahead and provided a system that performed vastly different, when it comes time to testing the actual systems, we'll be beating them over the head with the data and making a big stink. Everyone would.
The question is, do you trust AnandTech to accurately and fairly test a reference system as if it were an OEM sample? So far your answers would seem to suggest no.
What I'm asking myself: Did we really learn something new from this piece? Not really would be my answer.
Intel explained most of it before and we have seen enough leaks of the XPS 13 2-in-1 and the HP Spectre. Even Geekbench showed us that these CPUs have roughly the speed of 8565u on average (higher IPC, lower freq).
A journalist should always have a professional distance to these companies. This type of conflict of interest used to be most prominent in automobile magazines but the tech/PC companies are stepping up their marketing game.
Dude. Before release, before we would have to wait for products on shelves, Ian got a chance to go inside Intel and test and upcoming product. And he wasn't handed benchmark results, he wasn't told what to report, he was allowed to run largely independently his own standardized benchmark suite. So now, 3-6 months before laptops will be available, we have a preview of what performance will look like. I learned a ton from Ian's preview article, and from this benchmarking piece. I'm not an Intel fan, I'm an industry fan, and this was awesome. Please take your toxicity elsewhere, or better yet, cure yourself of it.
Ian, you're a good sport to participate in the comments section, but please don't let "brakdoo" or others pull you down. This was stellar work that I truly appreciate, as I'm sure most readers here do. I come to Anandtech specifically because of the high capabilities, understanding, and integrity of its writers and editors. Have been doing so for over 10 years. Please keep it up.
+1 on that comment. If company X let's you take a close first look AND bring your own tools I.e. test suite, Ian (and Andrei) would be fools not to take company X up on that offer. Yes, of course Intel has an agenda here, as does any other business, but we know that. In this case, I suspect that Intel wanted to show that Ice Lake actually exists and all parts are working, including the iGPU, unlike Whiskey Lake.
What Moizy said. Ian, you are quite fair and diplomatic in your responses. And if you are in some kind of Intel marketing conspiracy, for heaven's sake, I hope you are getting a good cut! Buy yourself something pretty, fella... (grin)
+1 Moizy thanks. I really do not have the time to go searching and collecting all the leaks out there, so this article was well timed for me and at a high level lets me know what to expect from these chips.
@Moizy: I guess props to AT if this turns out to be the real situation.
Curious what happens if we have another "oh our puff piece didn't notice they were using a sub 0 chiller under the table" kind of situation. Last time there was an anemic "oh, yeah, Intel could have been more straight forward" type reaction. So you can understand why people are skeptical about results that can't be independently validated, even (especially? ...given past experiences) if they come from AT.
To me, the only meaningful difference is timing. The unsound logic of the argument is a) Intel invites a few select press to a preview event months before availability, b) the select few press are flattered by the privilege and develop positively biased feelings toward Intel, therefore c) they report positively biased, flawed findings due to the privilege.
It's true that inviting a select few to the event could psychologically influence those few, making them slightly less objective than they may have otherwise been. But Ian's reporting isn't built on subjective opinions on Icy Lake, 10nm, and Intel. His reporting is built on his objective testing, using his standardized benchmarks. So even if Ian's view of Intel and Icy Lake were a little swayed by this privilege (which I doubt they were, he's not a new kid on the block, he deals with PR and Marketing and the like all the time), for this to translate into flawed, biased reporting, Ian would need to purposefully alter his standardized benchmarks in order to produced positively biased results. There is zero evidence that he did that here, and there is zero precedence to him doing that in the past, so the original logic is extremely flawed.
Based on the fact (as Ian mentioned at the beginning of the article) it DOES sound like others that were invited came unprepared, and willing to just spout Intel's rhetoric without objective measurements. Kudos to Ian for arriving prepared!
You are ranting but saying nothing substantial or even anything that makes sense. "Conflict of interest"? Really? In what way exactly, do you think they gifted Ian and the other AnandTech editors a few hundreds of Intel shares each? Maybe they gave them free vacations to Bali just to "thank" them? Or free top-end Intel based laptops and Intel SSDs for the next 5 years?
These examples *would* be conflicts of interest. Previewing an Ice Lake reference design while pointing out an entire list of caveats and limitations is not an example of a conflict of interest. "Professional distance" does not mean declining a product preview (why on Earth should they?), it means keeping an equal distance from all the companies the products of which you preview.
"Did we really learn something new from this piece? Not really would be my answer." Actually I learned something. To me this showed that once Ice Lake systems hit the market, it will be time for me to start looking for a deal on A Whiskey Lake system. We see potential performance increases in some things but not others and the things more interesting to me personally fall into the tests where there isn't much difference.
Besides, everyone understands this is a pre-release system and much more data will be needed to really make a decision...at least I thought everyone understands. My personal experience with laptops in general has been that how good the cooling performance is is probably the most important factor in real world performance as most of them will thermal throttle long before you get any kind of sustained performance out of them anyway.
It was an excellent article, considering the limited time you had with the platform. There will always be people calling fanboyism or the like no matter which company is in focus. You balanced it all as well as you could with the time you had the device for, and it was a great read. If anything I'd actually say it sometimes came off as being a bit anti-Intel; Not in terms of their products, but the whole thing with them trying to involve themselves more in how you test their stuff, perhaps to their advantage. Sometimes sounded a bit "Just let me do my job and I'll let you do yours". But I thought that was kinda good ;)
Well, the thing is more about the free advertisement. You are not the only one who went there. Toms did and their testing are downright different from yours. I believe your numbers way more than theirs, however there is a cost of being part of scheme like this.
> We do our own validation of the platform to remove as much Intel involvement as possible.
You say that, but it's difficult to believe Anandtech can be trusted when you botched the Ryzen 3 benchmark reviews so so badly and have subsequently been in denial ever since (looking at you, Ryan on reddit).
You personally have suggested that security isn't important so any performance impact resulting from security mitigations doesn't sound like something you would personally care about, thus playing right into the hands of a firm like Intel.
So, can you trusted? That would be a big fat "no" from me, I'm afraid.
Yeah the Qualcomm pieces were problematic too because they could have just released a few benchmarks (and they did) to give us a rough understanding of the performance.
The real power consumption and performance (especially therm. throttled) came later in real world tests.
It was not until Andrei compared the 855 to the Kirin 980 when we saw the Kirin to be slightly faster and more efficient in pure CPU tests.
At least Qualcomm made real statements about release dates and those chips being really high volume. We still don't know whether or not Ice Lake will be in just a few laptops.
brakdoo: your stance here is nonsense. You're arguing that it's _more_ problematic to accept special access to do your own independent testing than it is to simply accept a company's marketing statements in good faith? That makes _zero_ sense, and is certainly not how journalism is supposed to work. Articles like this are very valuable as they give interested readers information that can be trusted to a certain degree (even if the test platform isn't what they're going to be buying in the future), unlike marketing statements which always have some spin.
Ian: Excellent article, and good job getting all that work done in just eight hours. Keep up the good work.
"Now 5G is just sub-6 and the only important part is massive MIMO"
cute. I've been, ever since 5G was a twinkle in the eye of whoever, that mmWave 5G was, and always will be, vaporware. getting it to work in the real world, when engineers and scientists have known for decades how microwave (and near) propagates, is a non-starter. the telecom BS has reached ever new highs.
This seems like a good thing to me - we're getting useful information earlier, even if it is limited in scope. It's not like AMD offered the same and you turned them down. Keep up the good work!
I'm glad you did the benchmarks. At this point everybody knows intel has manufacturing problems and that availability will be extremely limited for these parts. It's nice to know they have updated designs in a working state and that even with limited clock speeds they're pretty fast. I'm disappointed intel isn't simultaneously releasing these parts on 10nm and 14++++ but hopefully that's because they are more confident about their future roadmap.
Tell me why i need to prepare months in advance? It's great you get a paper launch product in hand. But to me it's still a paper launch. What's different here from you just releasing the benchmarks on availability day? If i was in the mood for a new cpu/mobo purchase i would start saving up and buy whatever is best on the day. Agree with brakdoo!
@Kvaern1, your point that people should not criticize. So you can either applaud or move along? If nobody ever calls you out for anything then when do you learn? Pointing out something like a paper launch coming from a manufacturer with a history of deception is no without merit.
Now whether this applies to this article is a different matter. But your low quality sarcasm response and the "only open for praise" attitude shows some troubling mediocrity.
Ian, those companies do things like that for a reason. IMHO, they want to make the public believe that 10nm is a reality, when in fact it is still a fairy tale. Intel knows that the frequency drop, the yield and the price doesn't worth the trouble to switch to 10nm. Sure, they told investors that 10nm exist and they are releasing products to claim this, but in reality, 10nm will be just there so Intel doesn't need to admit to investor that 10nm is a fiasco. If they did, the price of the stock will lose significant value and it would affect the public perception of the company.
This is not a reasonable argument that he gave you. He just wanted, like a lot of people today, to show his hate for Intel. He's not seeing things straight anymore and I really don't understand this hate speech that many people have today about certain products. It is what it is, reviewers test them and there is not much else to say. I guess the reason is more people are being stupid these days.
@dguy6789, obviously plenty of people do. AT did somehow manage to bungle repeatedly, always in positive ways for Intel, not so positive for the competition.
And as these things go, if it turns out AT's current article is spot on then not much will change (past mistakes were still made). But if it turns out they were played *again* (assuming ignorance not bad intentions) and AT offers the same anemic retraction then it's going to be pretty clear where the editorial team stands.
You can't please everyone lol. I thought the article was great, informative and, imo, fair. Interesting to get a first look at the architecture and I enjoy reading your assessments on the results, puts it into context for me. :)
Yes, how *dare* anyone publish *anything* that could be read as positive about new recent Intel products' performance gains, and the sheer audacity to do so within less than a month of the Ryzen 3000 launch! :/
It might be an obvious marketing ploy (I agree with that assessment) and that can be pointed out but a journalist wouldn’t be doing their job any better by ignoring this opportunity... both amd and intel as well as NVIDIA play these games all the time.
Yeah Intel is trying to give journalists more info than the public for the past few months/quarters so that these people think they are special because they are "insiders" (they don't have much else to be proud of).
These journalists talked so much about IPC over these months but it turned out to be just BS because IPC is nothing without frequency (to a certain extent AMD did the same stupid IPC thing). It is obvious that the frequency issue is not just about 10 nm but instead it's caused by this messed up architecture. Otherwise Intel would just sell 14 nm Ice lake CPUs...
They even fooled these tech sites with the graphics performance. It's barely faster than Iris plus 655.
AMD had a bad history of weird journalist events and giving too much NDA info but Intel turned it into a real shitshow.
Likely you have some problems with Sunny Cove that is clearly superior than Zen 2 even without fast desktop DRAM and without an insane amount of L3. Pretty certain you are trying to realize how fast will be Ice Lake EP in server space. The end of a dream??? Yes it is.
Obviously Intel is preparing itself to finer nodes that will not allow fast clock speeds anymore but an intersting density instead.
This review is a nice example of what will be the future Intel core performance cadence in the next two years. Many thanks Haifa Team.
About GPU, it is pretty good because now it performs at 15W level and without an expensive eDRAM. Try to run the new GPU within 28W and you will have an idea of the advantages of the new ark vs. 9.5.
Brakdoo is way off in his assertions, but I believe you have rose colored glasses too.
Intel got the efficient process working, not the high performance one. They still have 14nm planned out for another year at least.
It isn't just the lithography that is the problem either, Sunny Cove is a different architecture, it just might not clock as high. We'll have to wait and see how that all works out.
I do agree though, speeds are probably going to stall if not regress moving forward. It's just a lot of amps going through a tiny circuit. 14nm might have been the sweet spot to get the highest clock speeds. Smaller circuits will only get hotter carrying the same current. Unless they significantly lower power usage it is going to be a problem.
Apparently .7v is the switching point for silicon semi-conductors, below that the transistors don't switch, so to go beyond 7nm or 5nm they're very likely going to have to move to a more conductive material to lower the switching point as well as resistance (heat buildup).
I find partisanship frustrating. You are absolutely right that we just got IPC but bad frequency from both AMD and Intel, so it is nice to see the IPC side of things, but we should be able to criticize Intel without someone brushing us off as being AMD supporters or some nonsense. The new products (these mobile chips in particular) are not very good. Still should be polite to Ian Cutress, he does do fantastic work.
I guess I didn't get the memo that no 6 core ultra low voltage parts were coming. I'm very disappointed in the very tiny gains this year. I'm waiting for a good 6 core CPU at 25 watts.
Absolutely at least AMD's chips clock the same or an extra 100 mhz higher, Intel's new chips clock several hundred mhz slower, making them really poor this year. Making 6 core options more important than ever. 4 cores in this situation are really useless without a large price drop.
This is also the efficient line of chips. Last I heard they got the efficient transistor design going but not the high performance one.
They may clock higher, they may be limited by the architecture. Dunno. Could entirely be because they packed the chip too tight, the hotspots that spike the Zen 2 temps may actually be causing significant issues with 10nm. In this case the whole "transistors per sq mm" argument may become moot. Packing them in so tight they can't displace heat properly is a bad thing and may be what is happening here.
I think you to give both Ian and Intel more credit, there is no doubt that Intel has some struggles with going to 10nm but this is first part of the recovery. The results here are extremely impressive especially that these products are low power laptop and not large desktop gaming machines.
It would be interesting to compare the new Dell XPS 13 2in1 against existing dell XPS 15 2in1 in which the 15 2in1 has higher power cpu and GPU. I would say it likely with results here, the 13 2in1 has chance of beating the 15 2in1
It going to be interesting to see what 45W laptops are like and the desktop chips on Sunny Cove.
Give Intel credit... HAHAHAHAHAHA.... they don't deserve any credit. These directors just want to have the stock rise to have a better pay check. Everything they do is biased with this in mind.
Water cannot be wet, funny enough. "Wet" is the property of an object that has come in contact with a liquid, most notibly water, since water cannot be I contact with itself to cause wetness, water is therefore, not wet. :P
I am assuming that Ice lake-Us aren't all i7s, because that's what the first page table is listing. Also, when you have more time, would it be possible to put spec2k6/2k17 test results of other processors at 3.9ghz for a more direct IPC comparison? Not to mention it'd be nice to list results from mobile SoCs (A12, SD855 etc) just for reference as well.
Did you ask them if this is something Intel will tweaking this further?
It seems that the 25W mode is leaving a lot of GPU performance on the table, and in GPU-intensive tasks they'd gain a lot more by keeping the CPU power budget intact while providing more headroom for higher clocks on the GPU. This would be akin to what AMD is doing with mobile Raven Ridge and Picasso, but Intel has a major bandwidth advantage here.
I'm not sure how well the GPU clocks if you push the power. We haven't seen many Intel mobile IGPs go above 1100/1150 in quite a while. I wonder if there's a limit there, or simply Intel needed a minimum CPU performance and whatever was left went to the GPU.
Lots of ways to slice it. Only Intel knows for sure.
Plus, the iGPU will likely run into the speed limitations of having to use system RAM. Not sure how far one has to push the 64 EUs before they start to do the silicon equivalent of twiddling their thumbs waiting for the memory. Might be an interesting thing to test once Ice Lake is released into the wild.
I'd like to see a comparison of the iGPU vs the Gen9 iGPU.
It's more powerful per EU and there are a little over twice as many EU vs the previous models. That being said, the 530 was decent, I could play games at 720P low settings with decent framerates, but even at 3 times the performance that's still not enough to play those games at 1080p.
I actually think the Ice Lake with eGPU setup would be quite nice, even without it - I believe with performance numbers that Dell XPS 13 2in1 could possibly give my Dell XPS 15 2in1 a run for its money.
Also I curious with Thunderbolt 3 on the CPU now if any performance - keep in mind this is basically future USB4
One thing I saw related to SigGraph 2019, is AVX512 enhancements for 3d graphics processing coming in 3d ( not gaming but professional content creation ) world that it as 2x performance improvement on older systems - not sure how much this applies to Ice Lake system and require Xe to make it function
Tossing your GPU into an enclosure to run via thunderbolt is not a good idea, you're going to be heavily limited due to the added latency. It's a solution you only do as you are constantly traveling and never use the desktop while your laptop can't even run basic games.
There are several decent reviews of eGPU enclosures out fairly recently - my conclusion from all of them was how INCONVENIENT it would be considering the size of the enclosures, total cost of the setup, and not a single enclosure I've seen reviewed matches the regular desktop performance. I would not travel with the eGPU, and if I'm at home a small micro-ATX build or ITX build ends up less cluttered and using a smaller footprint than a laptop + eGPU at a fraction of the price with better performance.
There's an issue with CPU names in the 1st table ("Intel 10nm Ice Lake-U Series CPUs"):
All the chips are listed as "Core i7" before their suffixes. When reading the new name nomenclature, I was like "wait, Intel's using Core i7 for.... everything now?" Later tables don't have this problem, though.
The two different (?) shades of dark blue makes these charts very hard to understand. Accept the faster dark blue bars are the 9900K, but it is just visually confusing.
yawn. 10nm for nothing except the better IGP. they could have at least made it at least 6 core at lower clock speeds but more performance than last gen. at the same TDP. in fairness, this 10nm die is probably larger than AMD's single Ryzen 3000 7nm die
Keep in mind AMD 7nm die does not mean higher transistors than Intel 10nm Because under different process companies. Lower number does not always mean better
I'm saying that Intel's die/wafer is probably larger than AMD's 7nm die considering the decent IGP that comes with the Intel chip. I realized my comment is pointless though considering AMD has not released a 7nm APU yet for a proper comparison.
I think it would be smart to wait for retail laptops to hit the market before drawing a conclusion on ice lake, who knows what tweaks this ringer laptop from intel has.
Having the fan running on full all the time is kinda cheating to start with. You wouldn't actually want that as a laptop experience. However, the laptops were actually designed for OS testing (where you typically want to avoid throttling to have clean data) so I can cut them a bit of slack there.
There aren't any 10nm desktop parts on leaked roadmaps out to 2021.
If you trust the leaks from Semi-Accurate there probably never will. Of the 4 planned 10nm fabs one was upgraded to 14nm (from an even older process); one or two others are getting 7nm tooling. That leaves 10nm capacity at 25-50% of originally planned numbers meaning they're never going to make 10nm in high volume which in turn means that large chunks of the market will probably go directly to 7 in a few years after lingering at 14.
So Intel has produced a significant jump in IPC for for the first time in a long while, but they aren't going to bring it to the desktop any time soon. 7nm is targeted for 2021, but even if it is delivered on time the plan is to initially use it for data center products (a General-Purpose Graphics Processing Unit, to be followed by some Xeon processors). I've been expecting Ryzen 3XXX prices to fall over the next six months, but AMD may have no reason to reduce prices if Intel isn't planning to compete.
The gaming results section would really benefit from a clear statement of the video resolution in each case (I didn't see that anywhere in the article), and at least one comparison to a discrete graphics card.
I've been through too many generations of monitors, I guess. The default now would be 16:9 so the title bar numbers are clear enough. Except World of Tanks resolution wasn't apparently listed; but that's rare enough that I doubt it would be much use in comparing to other GPUs.
"POPCNT Microcode 50% faster than SW (under L1-D size)"
The comment must apply to something other than POPCNT (which is trivial to implement). I'd wager this comment refers "REP MOVS" given the next line is about "REP STOS".
“Throughout most of the last decade, Intel has kept the same cache configuration among its server cores with very few changes, aside from improving the micro-op cache through Sandy Bridge today, but with Sunny Cove, we get some key updates.“
Didn’t the cache hierarchy change considerably in skylake, with l2 growing and l3 becoming non-inclusive? Or am I misremembering?
You're thinking about the server variant of Skylake. This article is about the "client" variant of Skylake (i.e. the one with integrated graphics, etc) and therefore the commentary about caches is valid.
1. Still months from availability, so this is a very early preview. This is obviously going to bring up cries of paper launch and Intel marketing, but no website would have turned it down. I don't think the article is kind. 2. Gains are negligible. 3. Lower base clocks, all-core turbo and 1C turbos are highly concerning for the 10nm process compared to Whiskey Lake. 4. 'extra binning required' for the 28W SKU means that not many dies can make this, this is the 10nm limit for Intel. 5. AVX512 is a beast 6. Better GPU drags Intel from being way-behind to not being an embarrassment.
Except you've been able to get Zen APUs for a long time, and this isn't out yet. For all we know, Zen 2 APU will arrive in a similar timeframe. But it is good that it is competitive.
They'll be, in 6 months, assuming this demo unit can be produced at scale, priced competitively, and AMD doesn' t improve in the mean time. I understand why Anand did this review, and I enjoyed it, but it is really about Intel making vague promises in the hope we don't all buy AMD stuff for our 2-3-4-5 yearly upgrade in the next 6 months. And then we'll do it anyway ;-p
sadly, oem doesn't push amd based laptop as much as intel based laptop.
just recently we've got ryzen 3000 (zen+) laptop, despite it's released early this year. it only improve performance over previous generation by ~10%, but it greatly improves battery life though.
And graphics seem only abit better than the iris plus 655 in my NUC, but a large part of that is from the increased bandwidth as well. Any news of a 2 tflop or at least 1.7+ tflop variant of the graphics to match the best from ryzen mobile?
That would require Intel to design a SKU with 96EUs at least.
That doesn't exist, and likely won't on 14/10nm.
AMD is likely months away from 7nm Zen 2 APU with over 2 TFLOPS, assuming memory bandwidth to feed it (I truly hope they have LPDDR4X support for their mobile APUs).
There are rumors (check AT forums) about a Gen 12 (ice lake is 11) discrete gpu with 512 EUs (arctic sound). I believe 64 EUs is confirmed max on Ice lake, but the generation after that (Tiger lake?) might have more.
I notice that these parts all have Hyper threading. Has Intel addressed their security concerns with HT in Ice Lake, or do they see the benefits of HT to be greater then the risks in the mobile space?
QUOTE: "After attending the event, to which fewer than 10 press were invited, I now understand why. Some of the press invited didn’t have OS images, didn’t bring benchmarks with them, and were quite happy to go along with the flow. Intel provided benchmarks like Geekbench and 3DMark, which those press with their audiences were happy to run. I came prepared with both a new 1903 OS image and my benchmark suite, ready to rock and roll."
And QUOTE: "It was clear that some of the press in attendance only needed a day (or half a day), but for what we do at AT, then two days would be better."
Thank you for the article, and for doing the best you could in the time available.
Well I'm glad that we got a little bit more looking to this part of Intel's 10nm. I'm looking forward to the next iteration to be honest.
Actually I was more interested in the features of these new Intel laptops.
The benchmarks as you stated are just surface stuff until you can actually truly spend a while testing these things when they come out.
All the rave right now in some circles is AMD but I always liked Intel laptops for their features as well as performance. And I have owned a couple AMD laptops. They were good and did the job but my Intel laptops were always much better. That's my experience.
I understand the challenges of putting an article like this out to the public who complains a lot or just wants to troll. Thanks for sharing.
In terms of pure performance, Icelake is definitely let down by it's available frequency. It's in bad need of a 10nm++ process or a backport to 14nm.
It was a good idea to release it for laptops though, I think. Laptops definitely are about more than just the CPU, and the overall experience the Icelake featureset enables might actually be a good selling point.
I'd love to see an Icelake based microarchitecture released on Intel 14+++ though. Even though 14+++ has been around forever, I think it's still a good node. It's still completely untouched by any other node in frequency, power consumption isn't as important to desktop users, and the node must be so optimized by now that costs are good even with bigger dies.
Not to mention that all Intel's CPU fabs have been on 14nm for so long that the capital costs are long paid off.
I think we will see ICL on desktop via 14nm, simply because Intel can't afford to not compete with Zen 2. We won't get the full 20% IPC uplift because Intel will have to spend some of that to deal with 14nm's power/heat issues at high frequencies, but even a 10% bump would be enough to decisively regain the performance crown from Zen 2.
Pretty much every major architectural change and most every process shrink Intel has made over decades has initially resulted in only very modest improvements. But over time, as volumes and yields improved, they did process tweaks and minor die spins, and the yield had higher frequencies gradually improved. The very first Pentiums/Pentium Pro's struggled to out-perform the then-fastest 80486DX2-66's, on then-existing applications. There has been a slow, by consistently steady over decades improvement in IPC, and generally in frequency, with temporary setbacks in frequency at each new process introduction. But over time, they always ratchet up, with the cumulative effect over the years being very dramatic. While we're all surprised and disappointed that it has taken as long as it has for Intel to get 10 nm out, no one should be surprised that initial yields and frequencies are very modest. They always are, but they always improve, and in the case of 14 nm, they managed to improve them so much that they have been hard to let go of and move on from. In fact, 14 nm is still the best fit for some applications, and will remain so for so time.
Unfortunately Intel decided a long time ago to not bother to backport Ice Lake to 14nm. Ice Lake had been "done" for years, basically, afterall.
On the other hand, they did say that in the future, and with growing uncertainty of process gains, they want to develop architectures in a manner more independent from the actual process, so hopefully Ice Lake is the last µarch thats very tightly married to its process.
Kind of what we were expecting, which isn't much. 3 percent ST gains. Can now play AAA titles at 720p at 19fps... not exciting. We don't even get an upgrade from 4 to 6 cores at the same price, like what happened in the desktop. Terrible if you ask me. Guess I'll be keeping my laptop another year.
Curious if this ends up a return to Intel's old routine or if there's still constrained supply, etc. In particular, the longer 10nm server chips take to arrive, the longer AMD could grow off server revenue.
Two tick+tocks a few weeks apart! Busy times for AT, heh.
Maybe you didn't understand what you just read. This is the smallest improvement in CPU performance that Intel has had for years in mobile. Go look at that image again.
These comments are funny. The iGPU is not the CPU part I care about. I said "this is the smallest improvement in CPU ("CPU") performance that Intel has had for years in mobile" which is still true regardless of the GPU nobody needs.
Again, last year's 14nm chips matched the 3900x in SINGLE THREADED (not MT) performance, so if this one does too, how does that matter? Why try to talk about how great a new CPU is, when it is the smallest improvement we've seen in years?
and a laptop cant have more then 4 cores ?? let me guess phynaz, you still believe intels BS about 4 cores is all the mainstream needs ?? intels previous laptop cpus had more then 4 cores, IE 9850H for example with 6 cores.
"Intel's laptop SINGLE CORE cpu performance is keeping up with Intel's desktop chips, you must be worried" you can't make up this kind of stupidity, and you call me an idiot.
Yes and No. Intel at 10nm should have made AMD nervous but products only at 4 cores, there is nothing or little benefit with 10nm. I reckon, AMD's 7nm mobile parts will mostly start at 6 cores.
Those 3D particle movement tests seem to be too good to be true. There should be a gigantic jump due to an optimized AVX-512 code path and ICL's enhanced caching structure but it is beyond that in the comparison. I'm not actually suspecting the ICL system given the disclosures in the article (odd that the note about AVX-512 intrinistics for the 3DPM test is mentioned around SPEC compiler settings) but rather the other test systems. Where the Whisky Lake or Kaby Lake systems power or thermal constrained at all? On those Hauwei laptops, were you able to set their fan to a fixed 100% to match that of the ICL system?
Getting a bit more than double the performance from AVX2 vs. AVX-512 should be possible using some of the new Ice Lake extensions and the obvious doubling of SIMD width. But going from a score of 1802 in Whiskey Lake 25W to 9242 for Ice Lake 25W, over a factor of 5! Ice Lake would have to remove some other bottleneck that the 3DPM test hits really hard (division?).
Looking back at your previous reviews ( https://www.anandtech.com/show/13400/intel-9th-gen... ), you can see a similar speed up from AVX-512 between the i9 9900K and the i9 7820X but that is explained from Skylake-X having both double the SIMD width and double the number of SIMD execution units. The client version of Ice Lake shouldn't have the same AVX-512 throughput as Sky Lake server.
> the one area where Ice Lake excels in is graphics. Moving from 24 EUs to 64 EUs, plus an increase in memory bandwidth to >50 GB/s, makes for some easy reading.
I don't understand the comparison here and in this article. If you say a high-end intel processor update excels in graphics, you should compare to previous high-end processors (e.g. i7-8559U with Iris Plus 655). These have 48EUs not 24 and have 128MB EDRAM at 100 GB/s unlike the Ice Lake.
I am very interested in how the best Ice Lake processors compare to the best previous-gen processors, not how they compare to mediocre previous-gen processors.
Could the article be updated with some appropriate comparisons?
Agree on adding the best previous generation graphics to the comparison. Also, while the over 1 TFlops for the 64EU Gen 11 sounds (and is) impressive (within the Intel iGPU world) , didn't the 48EU with Crystal Well get close to that already?
The first apu with 1TFlops performance statement is full of asteriks. First, you have to exclude AMD; second, you have to exclude Intel Iris gpus with eDRAM.
Ian and Andrei, thanks for the article (Ian) and the tests (both) ! My take on why Intel did this "we let you play (test) with our reference system is that they needed to show that Ice Lake is for real, has working graphics, and not another gimped chip that is send off to pasture like Whiskey Lake. Overall, it seems to be an okay step forward, nothing great, but a step forward. For me, the main benefit of this new generation is AVX 512, which can speed certain programs up quite a lot. Lastly, Intel will sell a lot of these, mainly because AMD doesn't have a real competitive solution out there that can take them on in the low and lower power mobile space.
Which makes this unusual showcase even weirder... Intel is so far only planning a low power mobile release (either because of platform restrictions, Ryzen has shown that 7nm needs complex thermal management) or because of fab volume restrictions in 10nm. In either case Intels benefit from this showcase is quite small since AMD has no real contender announced anyways. At least when people where looking for pure SoC performance... and in any other case AMD can still compete quite well, but lacks product variety and quality, Huawei has shown that amazing Ryzen mobile devices are possible and Lenovo and others have shown how to do it wrong.
While it's great that Intel is being so open about ICL, the sad thing is that it only highlights how bare their cupboard is at the moment. This is their second attempt at 10nm, yet it's so obviously inferior to the ultra-refined 14nm, which makes it clear that despite Intel's half-decade of massive expense and effort, their 10nm node isn't salvageable.
I predict we'll see 14nm desktop ICL parts for Christmas, but I'm far more interested in what happens after 10nm. Does Intel have a plan to use all the hard-won experience on this failed node to make their next shrink actually happen on time and on schedule, or is the company in so deep that its decision-makers can't see any alternative route?
Just looking at those numbers, Icelake, while on average may be 20% faster, it is in fact some of the work load manage to get 30 to 40+% IPC increase. That is quite astonishing. And depending on AVX512 usage it could get even more performance out of it.
you have ?? that's great, good for you, you must be proud of your self, knowing you have more money then brains. my self.. would prefer to pay my mortgage, food, and other things that are needed
sorry phynaz, not poor. just have better things to spend my money on, cause unlike you, i dont still live with mommy and daddy, cause the way you insult people, and call them names, you must be some 15 year old, as this is what children do. maybe you should go away, grow up, and come back when you can talk to people with out resorting to insults, and childish behavior. 90% of your posts in this thread prove this, nothing but insults, does this make you feel better, calling people names and insulting them ?
Is useless to argue with AMD fans - they first state that 10nm is old fashion and that claims of 30% is based on 2015 Sky Lake cpus and when they find out it based on 8th generation they don't believe and then state G{U is not good enough. And that AVX 512 does not matter, bug Siggraph 2019 is going to change that.
But people forget about the past, yes AMD did it 64 bit back in the older days when nobody care much about greater than 4G memory. They build memory management and we had the frequency wars with Pentium 4 days - but Intel came back with I Series and change ever. Past is be repeated again. But this time is the core wars but Ice Lake is beginning of iSeries like in those days.
Please keep in mind this is only the low power cpus that Intel has release - it only the top of iceburg.
and its just a useless to argue with intel fans, right HStewart ?? you know 1st hand about that, as you are well known now to praise intel any chance you get, and seemingly forget the negative things intel has one over the years, especially the ones that cost intel a few billion dollars...
Lets just keep Intel articles to Intel only and AMD articles to AMD only - not of this fan boy BS, I support Intel primary because the AMD fans are so rude to Intel supports and I will never support them because of that. I do change, I use to support only Apple and hated Android - but I change on that one primary because I saw that Apple was not changing it UI and that they require developer tools on Mac's. I not actually Intel fan, Intel user and Intel developer - that is different. I have 30 years development experience.
You know, nobody cares about your ‘support’. If you mean your support to help intel - it merely serves to make it look pathetic. If you have nothing intelligent to offer besides your ‘support’, whichever brand or product it is to benefit, you better just stay out of the conversation as that would improve its average quality substantially.
I’m sure there are sites where comments from brand- supporting fans are appreciated. I sure as hell don’t read the comments here for that reason but to get insights and your comments just serve to make that harder as i need to weed through countless pointless conversations which involve you ‘supporting’ intel by lowering the collective intelligence of all readers here. Do everyone a favor and leave.
your are hilarious HStewart, maybe you should take your OWN advice for once.. oh wait.. you CAN'T cause you cant deal with the fact that intel isnt doing as good as it was before zen came out. when you stop with the intel fanboy BS, then maybe the rest of us will as well. no, you support intel cause you are a fanatic when it comes to them. " I not actually Intel fan " BS complete BS, and you have proved over AND over again, you are an intel fan.
30 years of experience ?? BS, you dont know the DIFFERENCE between WATTS and VOLTS, and you KEEP spelling architeCture WRONG
" they first state that 10nm is old fashion and that claims of 30% is based on 2015 Sky Lake cpus and when they find out it based on 8th generation they don't believe " who is they ?? to be fair HStewart, most of intels iGP, were best suited for any thing that isnt games that arent played on facebook, or games that are a few years old, and office work. but looks like intel is trying to improve that :-) " yes AMD did it 64 bit back in the older days when nobody care much about greater than 4G memory " i can remember a few people wanting to be able to use more then 4 gigs of ram in their comps, with out having to go to server platforms, i was one of them, and a few of my friends did too. " Please keep in mind this is only the low power cpus that Intel has release " from what i have read, seems like this is all intel can do with their current 10nm process right now, looks like intel, like with the desktop, thinks quad cores are " good enough ", cause if it isnt, why are these only quad core ? why not up the ante to 6 cores ? i guess, like the desk top, we have to wait to see if amd will do this...
AVX512 really doesn't matter as I would find it strange for people to run such workloads on their laptops rather than on dedicated machines with way more processing power.
For the common man, AVX512 does nothing though, but we can argue that most of the performance improvements don't really matter, I'm still using a device 5 years old with an i7 4720HQ and I feel no need to upgrade, only thing I am let down by is the graphics card (960M).
Intel will have a hard time convincing people to upgrade for this stuff before their machines basically keel over.
Audio/Video processing on the go. Those areas tend to get support for new extensions pretty fast. Maybe browsers. Microsoft has for a while supported AVX512 for codegen. Maybe graphics drivers might use it too. (Not sure how it is now, but Intel was pretty bad in using available instructions in their drivers.)
It is also about ISA parity. This has been on of my running issues with x86 as a whole is that the ecosystem tends to spit out a new 'major' extension every two or three years and then segment it to certain parts of the market (AVX has yet to appear on Celerons, Atoms, Pentium etc. after 8 years of being availible on Sandy Bridge). The software development side would have more incentive to optimize code for AVX is it was universally available and they didn't have to worry about a new extension on on the horizon.
*I should clarify that I am referring to user space ISA extensions here. New platforms etc. will likely introduce a handful of kernel and hypervisor extensions with every iteration but those should only matter to OS and driver developers.
Man, you two are easily the worst fanboys of all. Unable to see the big picture, only cherry picking whatever make sense to live in your delusional world of flying dinosaurs and laser sharks.
Great write-up Ian! Thank you so much for doing this. I have been reading a CPU reviews since 1998 so I think I know a thing or two about a good CPU review.
Intel's being nice (because of the new people it hired) and this is what it gets- More criticism. Can't win, huhn? Post one article and one big troll strolls in the first minute.
First of all, I think you did a wonderful and well down performance preview of Ice Lake mobile chips.
But I do have some important realistic question, especially with long history of issues with Intel going to 10nm
1. First of all, did Intel successfully overcome this hurdle? I am not yet sure they did for larger models - mostly like 2020 and more cores
2. Are all of Spectre/Meltdown security issues been fix with Ice Lake, personally no body has yet send a realistic virus on this stuff and appears that Intel has fix them all in this cpu.
3. IPC person people claimed it measurements were again 2015 Skylake cpu and you review indicates 8th generation cpus which sounds more likely
4/ AVX-512 has amazing results especially in one of benchmark, one of reason I got into CPU's and stuff, is because 3d content create, I think we see a new software in that area because SigGraph 2019/.
5. Internal Thunderbolt 3, yes it cost saving and yes we know USB4 is around the corner supporting it, but is there any performance advantages on the chip
5. I would to see performance test of new Dell XPS 13 2in1 against the Dell XPS 15 2in1, Even the 15 2in1 has higher power CPU and possibly GPU, I have feeling the new XPS 13 2in1 will give it a run for money, just for kicks you add the old 13 2in1
6, I am curious about what the performance of Y versions of Ice Lake will be like, not much was stated on it - how they compare to u.
7. Of course interested and curious about 35/45W versions of Ice Lake, I would say they will be out in early 2020.
Finally do you every see the merge of desktop chips and mobile chips, with power getting lower I would think that one day desktop chips would basically be the same as mobile.
Thermals and TDP are a test for UNdervolting and OCing on THICC laptops using ai windows OS GUI interface apps for easy one button flipping on and off for these CPUs and GPUs and RAM Timings customizations. Even for desktop towers soon using keyboard functions in special keys like on a laptop once they solve the luqid cooling issues on the THICC laptops.
Ian, In this and the Ryzen 3000 review, I noticed that the 3DPM benchmarks with AVX enabled seem to benefit from AVX-512 much more than I would anticipate.
If I'm understanding things correctly, the AVX-512 parts are capable of 2x512b FMAC / cycle in the case of Skylake-server or 1x512b FMAC + 1x512b ALU / cycle in the case of Sunny Cove, with both handling 2x512b load + 1x512b store / cycle. This would suggest to me that their vector FP performance/cycle ought to be around double that of Skylake-client or Zen 2, both of which do 2x256b FMAC / cycle and 2x256b loads + 1x256b store / cycle. However, in the 3DPM benchmark we see AVX-512 CPUs outpace the performance/cycle of AVX2 CPUs by a factor of 4 - possibly even more than 4, once we account for the frequency penalties associated with AVX-512!
Am I misunderstanding some critical piece of the AVX-512 extension that explains this boost, or is there something wrong with the AVX2 codepath for this benchmark? Only using xmm instructions? Not using FMA instructions?
A while back, Ian sent me the non-vectorized and AVX512-vectorized binaries for 3DPM for me to analyze. (I never looked at the AVX2 version since this was before it was made.)
Based on what I saw, I'm not at all surprised by the result. While I can't say that it fully explains such a large difference between AVX2 and AVX512, there are at least two things I noticed in the AVX512 binary that would contribute towards it.
1. There are 64-bit integer multiplies. AVX512 has the vpmullq instruction. AVX2 does not. Emulating this instruction in AVX2 is *extremely* costly. 2. The ratio of "heavy" to "light" AVX512 instructions is very low. Therefore, the 2nd FMA isn't needed to gain on AVX2.
I've never analyzed the AVX2 binary itself to see how that 64-bit multiply is being handled. It could be vectorized with extreme overhead, not vectorized at all, or worked-around at an algorithmic level.
ohhhh... That makes more sense. I assumed that the 3DPM benchmark was doing primarily floating point math. I also didn't realize that AVX2 didn't support packed 64b muls... Thanks for the info!
"The suggested PL2 for Kaby Lake-R was 44W, so this might indicate a small jump in strategy."
Yeah, whereby TDP is virtually meaningless and every machine is a complete mystery box until you buy it and discover what actual thermals/power/performance are like - again regardless of the TDP. This is all without overclocking, mind you.
I didn't feel like quoting the entire paragraph. But please DO elaborate. Then tell me how useful TDP is when they let OEMs set PL2 and Tau to... anything, really. You can take two "95W" processors and their power and thermals under load are radically different across a range of mainboards. The is reflected in mobile as well, where they let OEMs do pretty much whatever - the results aren't constrained by the processor no matter what the claimed TDP is. That doesn't even COUNT overclocking.
Meanwhile AMD chips don't hand over control to mainboards unless you ARE overclocking, which is how it SHOULD be.
I didn't see any discussion or comparison vs. the i7-9850H. Let's see a 28W TDP version of the 6 core i7-9850H put against these new chips. Same money, 50 percent more cores. Anyone in their right mind should be looking for an i7-9850H or 9750H laptop instead over these 10nm products. Where is the 6 core 10nm CPU? Don't buy a 4 cores laptop if you're looking for good performance in 2019-2020 imo.
If you want a 4 core laptop get a cheaper 14nm based laptop. If you want performance get a 6 core. I really really don't see the point in these products.
They gotta do *something* with all those 10nm wafers. Ian can't eat them all, and China said they don't want any more half-baked 10nm products after the last go-around. Maybe in 2020 we'll see 10nm++ and it will be as good as phase one 10nm was supposed to be.
But yeah, their current 10nm products are a bit disappointing outside of the fatter GPUs and better memory speeds. If you're using something with a dGPU there's little point vs their own 14++, it only starts to make sense if you want AMD-like iGPU performance with the latest Core processor design. Even then that's only limited to models with a high EU count (48+) as the 32 EU models just look meh.
They're going to have some stiff competition when 7nm Zen 2 APUs launch. I guess that's why they're attacking the low-power first, as AMD is still stuck on 12nm rehash Zen+ products for now.
Great work! And kudos to AMD to make Intel work so much harder to get good news out!
Two die carrier layouts but the chips looking identical:
First of all, I assume that the bigger and square chip is essentially the North-Bridge in 14nm?
And the smaller rectangular one the CPU+iGPU?
And I guess at 64EU we are talking about more than 60% of die area going to iGPU while even at quad core and AES-512 the CPU + cache will be perhaps 30%?
Is there any HSA or GPGPU compute to 'pay' for that iGPU surface and power in professional workloads?
Or is it really just for gaming?
Am I also correct to assume that of the extra thermal budget in the 28Watt parts, none really goes to the CPU, only allows it to stay within the 15 Watt envelope while the iGPU is also running?
Are we talking different die layouts and sizes for dual/quad CPUs and 64/32 iGPU EUs or is it really all just binning, meaning that an Core i3-1000G1 is a chip where 70% surface area of an Core i7-1060G7 failed to make it?
Why am I thinking they are heading down a path without consumer value returns?
I got a Lenovo S730 i7-8565U or Whisky Lake recently for a little over €1000 and I got a couple of J5005 Atoms recently for a little over €100 (admittedly complete notebook vs. RAM less Mini-ITX mainboard). The difference in power is 15 vs 10 Watts.
Both are fairly competent 2D machines even at 4k. Both are terrible gaming machines, but I don't really think that ultrabook portable gaming performance is a selling point.
If I were free to choose CPU vs. GPU real-estate, I'd definitely go left, say 6 or 8 CPU cores or just higher sustained turbos and make do with the J5005's 18 iGPU EUs, because CPU power is what I profit from professionally.
For GPU, every € I spend gets me vastly more gaming experience in less mobile form factors, which is fine: I don't see how I could run in a game and outside without breaking my newest toy.
I am guessing that SPEC CPU2017 Rate-1 means one copy of the benchmark, so it also gives us single-thread performance (and that explains why the power limit differences do not play a bigger role). Right?
One thing that I find remarkable about the recent AMD and Intel launches is that Intel follows the pattern (already seen with Broadwell) of starting a new process with a low clock, and therefore with mobile products and then servers. If they follow their earlier pattern, we will see higher-clocked stuff on 10nm in the future.
By contrast, AMD (and the smartphone SoC vendors) manage to get the same or better clock rates with the newer process as with the older ones.
From what I hear, Intel is very much into hand-tuning their CPUs (that's why backporting Ice Lake to 14nm would be very expensive in terms of both labor and time-to-market), while AMD and the smartphone SoC vendors rely on more automatic tools. What is interesting is that AMD managed to get within a few % of clock rate of a highly tuned Intel chip (with several years of tuning both the process and the layout of the chip) with this more automatic approach, while having a similar IPC.
Intel has been working on Ice Lake and 10nm for a while, and still suffer from a clock rate deficit compared to Whiskey Lake (but in a way, 10nm is just becoming usefully online now, so maybe we should start the clock now). The fact that they have increased the TDP of the Y SKUs and decreased the base clock of the 15W SKUs (from 1.9GHz for the 8665U to 1.3GHz for the 1065G7) indicates that they still have problems being competitive wrt power consumption under load with Whiskey Lake. It will be interesting to see the final products (and compare them to Whiskey Lake and Picasso products with similar power delivery and cooling).
Reading isn't Phynaz' strong suit. However when you state a fact he can't counter, he immediately switches to low brow personal attacks - those are really more his speed.
"The 1065G7 comes quite close to the fastest desktop parts, however it’s likely it’ll need a desktop memory subsystem in order to catch up in total peak absolute performance."
What does it mean exactly? How "desktop memory subsystem" differs from this laptop memory other than module size? Also, there is compatibility with LPDDR4x? Where are SODIMMs for that?
"The 1065G7 comes quite close to the fastest desktop parts, however it’s likely it’ll need a desktop memory subsystem in order to catch up in total peak absolute performance."
What does it mean exactly? How "desktop memory subsystem" differs from this laptop memory other than module size? Also, there is compatibility with LPDDR4x? Where are SODIMMs for that?
At this point I'm still confused if I should be looking for an Ice Lake laptop come christmas, but more objective testing is always a good thing. Thanks Ian.
is anyone else irked by Intel’s naming scheme for the Y-series processors? They’re not even ‘Y’ series marked anymore; that’s a thing of the past! They’re now ‘0’ series (zero), and extremely hard to tell at that.
Obviously since Broadwell, and the introduction of Core M, intel marketing has been trying to get rid of that brand. Well now they’ve pretty much accomplished that.
Well I think Core M is officially gone with this version. Naming convention make since - note that none of Core M processors including Skylake Y series ever had quad cores. Big difference is power difference 0 series are 9V while U is 15/28 and also 28. It will be interesting comparing Core i7-1065G7 vs Core i7-1060G7 with only differences appearing to be Watts and Freq
In my opinion what is worst is AMD coming out with Ryzen 7, 5, 3 … making people think they have same as i7, i5, i3,,,
Yeah, everybody has been wildly misled by that numbering. When I bought my R7 1800X I thought it would be just like an i7. But instead I got twice the cores, threads, and cache. I hate it when that happens...
Slower in games, faster in almost everything else (when the R7 1800X came out, the i7 at the time was the i7 7700k)
Just like today, the Ryzen 9 3900x is slightly slower in most games (beating it in others) while smashing the i9 9900k in almost any other task. Funny how now we have two CPUs for two different things, huh? Competition is good~
um HStewart, " Big difference is power difference 0 series are 9V while U is 15/28 and also 28." 9 volts??? again.. do you NOT not know the difference between WATTS and VOLTS ?? i guess by YOUR logic, U uses 15 and 28 VOLTS ????
It's easy to focus on AMD and say that the reason Intel didn't do a pure "tick" release this time was because it couldn't afford to pass up any opportunity for improvement in a more competitive environment. But this forgets another factor: during the years of the "tick-tock" strategy, Dennard Scaling was operative, so a process shrink of itself brought a major performance improvement.
Now, without Dennard Scaling, even without serious competition from AMD, if Intel had brought out a process shrink without architectural improvements, people would have said "What's the point?".
The SPEC numbers vs the 3900x are pretty insane. Is that single thread or what? Are the benches short enough to run within the max turbo power envelope?
I'm trying to understand how a 15W Ice Lake and 15W Whiskey Lake are comparable to a 9900K or 3900x.
Of course it is single threaded (Hence Ian saying words like IPC in that section). There are 0 reasons you'd pick this CPU to compete against the 3900x in multi core workloads.
“For Sunny Cove this has increased, but it gets a bit more complicated. In one clock Sunny cove can perform 2x64-byte reads and either 1x64-byte write, or 1x32-byte write, or 2x16-byte writes.”
@Ian Cuttress Please correct me if I’m remember wrong.
Wow. 0.7 GHz? AKA 733 MHz? Like the Celeron I had back in 2000? (That overclocked like a *BOSS*, just crank the FSB up from 66 MHz to 100 MHz, and get 1.1 GHz.)
The best OC CPU Intel ever released was the Celeron 300A (had that at 598mhz) :) almost 100% OC, moved on to Pentium 3 Coppermine & Tulatin and an ES (clocked at 733) using the 920C (rambus) chipset (horror absolute) . But coming back to earth and reality this preview is just A PR exercise in customer retention. Sure the iGPU and cores are better, but come on people are you this easily won over. The Y series is more power hungry. Id rather you stick to actual released products, as many will see this as doing Intels' PR work for them as I do.
Given that the CPU is already starting to ship to OEMs, better to have hard facts and analysis from a trusted source than weeks more of rumor and speculation while we wait for an arbitrary public release date.
Appreciate the preview. YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed highlighted your preview and made sure to tell viewers to come here and give you guys the views.
It's probably already been asked an answered, and I've missed it in the thread or review, but how do we think these are likely to stack up against the current AMD CPUs for single thread performance? I noticed that they appear to have increased the per clock performance, but appear to have had to drop the clock rate to get that.
The thing that's eating my PC's lunch is primarily VR flight simulators (Tomcat Tomcat Tomcat!), and I'm expecting the main ones are going to remain single thread performance dependent for the next 5 years or so.
Basically, if it stays in the 5%-10% range, and I'm still able to put together a machine that can do 45+ fps with a Ryzen 3000, then it make more sense to take that hit, but if we're looking at a 15-20% effective difference, then the Intel option becomes more meaningful.
I just wish the Il-2 or DCS teams would put together a good benchmarking tool...
This Ice Lake part is targeted at mobile. If you need guaranteed single thread performance, you'd be better off with a desktop part that clocks higher and can operate at max frequency for an indefinite time without running into thermal or power budget limits.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14664/testing-intel... This page show direct comparison with Ryzen 3900X, but it's only synthetics and doesn't normalize for frequency differences between the CPUs. That will surely come later in the full review.
These chips are priced quite high esp the i3's the Dualcore is outrageous (20$ discount for half the cores and threads?).They will only sell in limited qtys at such high prices . Bring on the 14nm equiv at sane prices. what discrete gfx does the IGPU equate to? gt1030 vs 2200g vs 3400ge??
The bit per cycle throughput of REP STOS is really only half of the picture - the startup latency matters a lot too! On my Skylake, I've measured a minimum latency of 29 cycles* (any REP STOS from 1 byte to 128 bytes takes 29 cycle, then it starts going up from there). Some compilers make heavy use of it even for small stores/copies (VC6, first and foremost, but also the .NET JIT for stack zeroing), so it can be pretty important to performance in some scenarios.
*I am no Agner Fog... nor anywhere close to him, this measurement should be taken with a grain of salt ;-)
@Ian Sunny Cove SIMD chart and others have many asterisks, why?
"POPCNT Microcode 50% faster than SW (under L1-D size)" What does this mean? The CPU uses microcode and HW, not SW, AFAIK, much less use it to implement the POPCNT instruction.
Spelling and grammar errors: Insert: I've been commenting corrections for at least 1 year now, if you guys want me to change the format, or have any request regarding phrasing, etc., just ask. Thanks for your work!
"L3 latencies look similar, however we'll dwell into that just in a bit." I think you ment delve: "L3 latencies look similar, however we'll delve into that just in a bit."
"IPC increases against the mobile Skylake are 33 and 38% in the integer and fp suites, though we also have to keep in d mind these figures go beyond just the Sunny Cove architecture and also include improvements through the new LPDDR4X memory controllers." Missing percent sign and stray "d". "IPC increases against the mobile Skylake are 33% and 38% in the integer and fp suites, though we also have to keep in mind these figures go beyond just the Sunny Cove architecture and also include improvements through the new LPDDR4X memory controllers."
"...which did not go down to well." You mean "too" not "to": "...which did not go down too well."
"...we actually see a number of key microarchitectural improvements bubble up through in our SPEC testing." Excess "in": "...we actually see a number of key microarchitectural improvements bubble up through our SPEC testing."
I think you mean Baalsystemlord or Bàqhàlsýstemlord. Grammar is a barbarism of ghrammatics, another word for composition or handwriting, font, format, spacing, the looks, whereas you meant diction/lecsis or register, vocabulary, declension, placement, spelling, the meaning. you guys -> ye
I noticed on Intel Ark that Ice Lake CPUs do not have TSX instructions enabled / available. THis is interesting, since I believe TSX has also been used for some of the spectre attacks.
On 'Gaming Results (15W and 25W)', the graph is colored incorrectly. "On" and "Off" have the same color...and the legend colors are somehow not related to the graphic?
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jcc5169 - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
It's like a long running Intel advertisement ......Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
How so?jordanclock - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Probably because you provided objective measurements instead of long winded conjecture.peevee - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
"As for Ice Lake itself, our results lean towards Ice Lake outperforming Whiskey Lake, if only by a small margin."A laptop allowing more than 50W on a U chip and with cooler always running is certainly not representative of the real world performance a user would get from real systems. If Whiskey Lake results were obtained on a real system, then the results are not comparable enough that Ice Lake can actually be slower, especially in real world loads (note the performance on x264 and POV-Ray essentially has not changed).
But at least iGPU has improved nicely.
Samus - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
They have dedicated pages to 15w and 25w results. Not sure what you're on about about 'allowing more than 50W...' when they power limited the chip for specific-scenario benchmark results.Spunjji - Monday, August 5, 2019 - link
You may want to re-read that Power Results section - put simply, peevee's point still stands and your response is mistaken. At the 25W limit, the CPU spent more than 20 seconds operating between 50W and 35W before it finally dropped down. It's unlikely that the Coffee / Whiskey devices they tested allowed that sort of behaviour, as without a continuous 100% fan speed the thermals would have spiked and lowered the power limit far sooner. Even with the "power limits" you're talking about in place, the chip still boosts like that, so their benchmark results incorporate that behaviour. for any other company I might feel generously inclined, but Intel have already pulled a fast one multiple times by releasing CPUs that have nominally higher specifications but never reach their performance potential in shipping designs due to thermal constraints.Gondalf - Wednesday, January 8, 2020 - link
Spec suite (the reference) is a pretty loooong bench so the cpu stay at 15W all the time without your 50W. Your comment say a lot about you.yeeeeman - Wednesday, June 17, 2020 - link
Also, we not comparing power efficiency here but rather IPC of each core. And the bottom line is that Sunny Cove core has 5-10% better IPC than Zen 2.CSMR - Sunday, August 4, 2019 - link
There is no evidence that the iGPU has improved. We'd need a comparison against Iris Plus 655 to confirm that. We only know EUs have increased (64 vs 48) but EDRAM was removed.brakdoo - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
"First of all, I must say that Intel offering us to test a reference system in advance of a launch is a very good thing indeed"You are being played once again as a marketing tool for the Ice Lake launch. Don't tell me you don't see that.
Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
I'm encouraging the behaviour. I've been on at Intel to do something like this for a while. I'm giving credit where credit is due. As always with events like this companies like Intel have PR saying they want to do something, and the legal side of the equation resisting. If we get more opportunities like this in the future, it helps us provide a richer content base in advance of a product launch - people get to prepare in case they're in the mood for a purchase.Also, tell me if you say the same things on our Qualcomm QRD testing. Please.
brakdoo - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
You are just trying to get an edge over other sites but you are just being played.It's the same BS with Qualcomm and their mmWave BS that has been spread by sites like this. Now 5G is just sub-6 and the only important part is massive MIMO
brakdoo - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
"and are for the best part thermally unconstrained"Just wait for the real release and do real testing. Don't you think Intel can release SPEC and Cinebench benchmarks themselves?
They just want you to do cheap advertisement months in advance.
Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
We do our own validation of the platform to remove as much Intel involvement as possible. Also, if Intel went ahead and provided a system that performed vastly different, when it comes time to testing the actual systems, we'll be beating them over the head with the data and making a big stink. Everyone would.The question is, do you trust AnandTech to accurately and fairly test a reference system as if it were an OEM sample? So far your answers would seem to suggest no.
brakdoo - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
What I'm asking myself: Did we really learn something new from this piece? Not really would be my answer.Intel explained most of it before and we have seen enough leaks of the XPS 13 2-in-1 and the HP Spectre. Even Geekbench showed us that these CPUs have roughly the speed of 8565u on average (higher IPC, lower freq).
A journalist should always have a professional distance to these companies. This type of conflict of interest used to be most prominent in automobile magazines but the tech/PC companies are stepping up their marketing game.
Moizy - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Dude. Before release, before we would have to wait for products on shelves, Ian got a chance to go inside Intel and test and upcoming product. And he wasn't handed benchmark results, he wasn't told what to report, he was allowed to run largely independently his own standardized benchmark suite. So now, 3-6 months before laptops will be available, we have a preview of what performance will look like. I learned a ton from Ian's preview article, and from this benchmarking piece. I'm not an Intel fan, I'm an industry fan, and this was awesome. Please take your toxicity elsewhere, or better yet, cure yourself of it.Ian, you're a good sport to participate in the comments section, but please don't let "brakdoo" or others pull you down. This was stellar work that I truly appreciate, as I'm sure most readers here do. I come to Anandtech specifically because of the high capabilities, understanding, and integrity of its writers and editors. Have been doing so for over 10 years. Please keep it up.
Dennis Travis - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Well said Moizy. I was about the post the same basic thing. Good job Ian.eastcoast_pete - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
+1 on that comment. If company X let's you take a close first look AND bring your own tools I.e. test suite, Ian (and Andrei) would be fools not to take company X up on that offer. Yes, of course Intel has an agenda here, as does any other business, but we know that. In this case, I suspect that Intel wanted to show that Ice Lake actually exists and all parts are working, including the iGPU, unlike Whiskey Lake.MrSpadge - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Well said Moizy, I totally agree! And would like to add: "haters gonna hate!"PreacherEddie - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
+1rangerdavid - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
What Moizy said. Ian, you are quite fair and diplomatic in your responses. And if you are in some kind of Intel marketing conspiracy, for heaven's sake, I hope you are getting a good cut! Buy yourself something pretty, fella... (grin)0ldman79 - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Rock on man.Well said.
Sailor23M - Monday, August 5, 2019 - link
+1 Moizy thanks. I really do not have the time to go searching and collecting all the leaks out there, so this article was well timed for me and at a high level lets me know what to expect from these chips.close - Monday, August 5, 2019 - link
@Moizy: I guess props to AT if this turns out to be the real situation.Curious what happens if we have another "oh our puff piece didn't notice they were using a sub 0 chiller under the table" kind of situation. Last time there was an anemic "oh, yeah, Intel could have been more straight forward" type reaction. So you can understand why people are skeptical about results that can't be independently validated, even (especially? ...given past experiences) if they come from AT.
tijag - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
You sir are a first rate obtuse troll.chowmanga - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Would you say there was a difference between getting a product in advance and getting one when the rest of the press gets one?Moizy - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
To me, the only meaningful difference is timing. The unsound logic of the argument is a) Intel invites a few select press to a preview event months before availability, b) the select few press are flattered by the privilege and develop positively biased feelings toward Intel, therefore c) they report positively biased, flawed findings due to the privilege.It's true that inviting a select few to the event could psychologically influence those few, making them slightly less objective than they may have otherwise been. But Ian's reporting isn't built on subjective opinions on Icy Lake, 10nm, and Intel. His reporting is built on his objective testing, using his standardized benchmarks. So even if Ian's view of Intel and Icy Lake were a little swayed by this privilege (which I doubt they were, he's not a new kid on the block, he deals with PR and Marketing and the like all the time), for this to translate into flawed, biased reporting, Ian would need to purposefully alter his standardized benchmarks in order to produced positively biased results. There is zero evidence that he did that here, and there is zero precedence to him doing that in the past, so the original logic is extremely flawed.
uberDoward - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Based on the fact (as Ian mentioned at the beginning of the article) it DOES sound like others that were invited came unprepared, and willing to just spout Intel's rhetoric without objective measurements. Kudos to Ian for arriving prepared!Santoval - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
You are ranting but saying nothing substantial or even anything that makes sense. "Conflict of interest"? Really? In what way exactly, do you think they gifted Ian and the other AnandTech editors a few hundreds of Intel shares each? Maybe they gave them free vacations to Bali just to "thank" them? Or free top-end Intel based laptops and Intel SSDs for the next 5 years?These examples *would* be conflicts of interest. Previewing an Ice Lake reference design while pointing out an entire list of caveats and limitations is not an example of a conflict of interest. "Professional distance" does not mean declining a product preview (why on Earth should they?), it means keeping an equal distance from all the companies the products of which you preview.
bcronce - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
I learned a lot. Like trade-offs between latency and throughput in several different ways. Or increase in cache-hits vs latency.Ratman6161 - Wednesday, August 7, 2019 - link
"Did we really learn something new from this piece? Not really would be my answer."Actually I learned something. To me this showed that once Ice Lake systems hit the market, it will be time for me to start looking for a deal on A Whiskey Lake system. We see potential performance increases in some things but not others and the things more interesting to me personally fall into the tests where there isn't much difference.
Besides, everyone understands this is a pre-release system and much more data will be needed to really make a decision...at least I thought everyone understands. My personal experience with laptops in general has been that how good the cooling performance is is probably the most important factor in real world performance as most of them will thermal throttle long before you get any kind of sustained performance out of them anyway.
casperes1996 - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Don't let comments like this get to you, Ian.It was an excellent article, considering the limited time you had with the platform. There will always be people calling fanboyism or the like no matter which company is in focus. You balanced it all as well as you could with the time you had the device for, and it was a great read.
If anything I'd actually say it sometimes came off as being a bit anti-Intel; Not in terms of their products, but the whole thing with them trying to involve themselves more in how you test their stuff, perhaps to their advantage. Sometimes sounded a bit "Just let me do my job and I'll let you do yours". But I thought that was kinda good ;)
eva02langley - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Well, the thing is more about the free advertisement. You are not the only one who went there. Toms did and their testing are downright different from yours. I believe your numbers way more than theirs, however there is a cost of being part of scheme like this.CityBlue - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
> We do our own validation of the platform to remove as much Intel involvement as possible.You say that, but it's difficult to believe Anandtech can be trusted when you botched the Ryzen 3 benchmark reviews so so badly and have subsequently been in denial ever since (looking at you, Ryan on reddit).
You personally have suggested that security isn't important so any performance impact resulting from security mitigations doesn't sound like something you would personally care about, thus playing right into the hands of a firm like Intel.
So, can you trusted? That would be a big fat "no" from me, I'm afraid.
Jorgp2 - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Lol, this is exactly what qualcomm does.Its just a preview, they will do better testing at release.
brakdoo - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Yeah the Qualcomm pieces were problematic too because they could have just released a few benchmarks (and they did) to give us a rough understanding of the performance.The real power consumption and performance (especially therm. throttled) came later in real world tests.
It was not until Andrei compared the 855 to the Kirin 980 when we saw the Kirin to be slightly faster and more efficient in pure CPU tests.
At least Qualcomm made real statements about release dates and those chips being really high volume. We still don't know whether or not Ice Lake will be in just a few laptops.
Andrei Frumusanu - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
The 855 preview contained almost our whole test suite, with just the thermal GPU tests missing due to lack of time.> It was not until Andrei compared the 855 to the Kirin 980 when we saw the Kirin to be slightly faster and more efficient in pure CPU tests.
This was included in the preview, and not later:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13786/snapdragon-85...
The S10 review essentially had no changes on those numbers.
Valantar - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
brakdoo: your stance here is nonsense. You're arguing that it's _more_ problematic to accept special access to do your own independent testing than it is to simply accept a company's marketing statements in good faith? That makes _zero_ sense, and is certainly not how journalism is supposed to work. Articles like this are very valuable as they give interested readers information that can be trusted to a certain degree (even if the test platform isn't what they're going to be buying in the future), unlike marketing statements which always have some spin.Ian: Excellent article, and good job getting all that work done in just eight hours. Keep up the good work.
FunBunny2 - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
"Now 5G is just sub-6 and the only important part is massive MIMO"cute. I've been, ever since 5G was a twinkle in the eye of whoever, that mmWave 5G was, and always will be, vaporware. getting it to work in the real world, when engineers and scientists have known for decades how microwave (and near) propagates, is a non-starter. the telecom BS has reached ever new highs.
Eletriarnation - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
This seems like a good thing to me - we're getting useful information earlier, even if it is limited in scope. It's not like AMD offered the same and you turned them down. Keep up the good work!andrewaggb - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
I'm glad you did the benchmarks. At this point everybody knows intel has manufacturing problems and that availability will be extremely limited for these parts. It's nice to know they have updated designs in a working state and that even with limited clock speeds they're pretty fast. I'm disappointed intel isn't simultaneously releasing these parts on 10nm and 14++++ but hopefully that's because they are more confident about their future roadmap.eastcoast_pete - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
I think they ran out of space to fit any more "++++" after the 14 nm.StormyParis - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Don't they have cross-licensing with MS, allowing them to use '#' for 3+ '+' ?brunis.dk - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Tell me why i need to prepare months in advance? It's great you get a paper launch product in hand. But to me it's still a paper launch. What's different here from you just releasing the benchmarks on availability day? If i was in the mood for a new cpu/mobo purchase i would start saving up and buy whatever is best on the day. Agree with brakdoo!Kvaern1 - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
Blink if someone is forcing you to read AT articles and you need help.close - Tuesday, August 6, 2019 - link
@Kvaern1, your point that people should not criticize. So you can either applaud or move along? If nobody ever calls you out for anything then when do you learn? Pointing out something like a paper launch coming from a manufacturer with a history of deception is no without merit.Now whether this applies to this article is a different matter. But your low quality sarcasm response and the "only open for praise" attitude shows some troubling mediocrity.
eva02langley - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Ian, those companies do things like that for a reason. IMHO, they want to make the public believe that 10nm is a reality, when in fact it is still a fairy tale. Intel knows that the frequency drop, the yield and the price doesn't worth the trouble to switch to 10nm. Sure, they told investors that 10nm exist and they are releasing products to claim this, but in reality, 10nm will be just there so Intel doesn't need to admit to investor that 10nm is a fiasco. If they did, the price of the stock will lose significant value and it would affect the public perception of the company.This is what I can take from this whole thing.
Klimax - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Is sky blue in your world or is it some version of red? You may have had point a year or two back...0ldman79 - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Uh...They reworked the entire 10nm process to get it going.
This isn't impossible, it is expensive and time consuming.
They've spent the $$$ and at least a year working on it.
It is hardly unheard of that the single most successful tech company on the planet figured out a problem.
close - Tuesday, August 6, 2019 - link
@0ldman79 "the single most successful tech company" - that's the overstatement of the millennium. And of course I'm no stranger to overstatements.0ldman79 - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Uh...They reworked the entire 10nm process to get it going.
This isn't impossible, it is expensive and time consuming.
They've spent the $$$ and at least a year working on it.
It is hardly unheard of that the single most successful tech company on the planet figured out a problem.
yeeeeman - Wednesday, June 17, 2020 - link
This is not a reasonable argument that he gave you. He just wanted, like a lot of people today, to show his hate for Intel. He's not seeing things straight anymore and I really don't understand this hate speech that many people have today about certain products. It is what it is, reviewers test them and there is not much else to say. I guess the reason is more people are being stupid these days.dguy6789 - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Stop whining. The article is well written and provides plenty of information on Intel's new chip. Nobody gives a hoot about your tinfoil hat nonsense.close - Tuesday, August 6, 2019 - link
@dguy6789, obviously plenty of people do. AT did somehow manage to bungle repeatedly, always in positive ways for Intel, not so positive for the competition.And as these things go, if it turns out AT's current article is spot on then not much will change (past mistakes were still made). But if it turns out they were played *again* (assuming ignorance not bad intentions) and AT offers the same anemic retraction then it's going to be pretty clear where the editorial team stands.
AshlayW - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
You can't please everyone lol. I thought the article was great, informative and, imo, fair. Interesting to get a first look at the architecture and I enjoy reading your assessments on the results, puts it into context for me. :)I'm a pretty hardcore Ryzen fan too :P
MDD1963 - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Yes, how *dare* anyone publish *anything* that could be read as positive about new recent Intel products' performance gains, and the sheer audacity to do so within less than a month of the Ryzen 3000 launch! :/jospoortvliet - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
It might be an obvious marketing ploy (I agree with that assessment) and that can be pointed out but a journalist wouldn’t be doing their job any better by ignoring this opportunity... both amd and intel as well as NVIDIA play these games all the time.brakdoo - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Yeah Intel is trying to give journalists more info than the public for the past few months/quarters so that these people think they are special because they are "insiders" (they don't have much else to be proud of).These journalists talked so much about IPC over these months but it turned out to be just BS because IPC is nothing without frequency (to a certain extent AMD did the same stupid IPC thing). It is obvious that the frequency issue is not just about 10 nm but instead it's caused by this messed up architecture. Otherwise Intel would just sell 14 nm Ice lake CPUs...
They even fooled these tech sites with the graphics performance. It's barely faster than Iris plus 655.
AMD had a bad history of weird journalist events and giving too much NDA info but Intel turned it into a real shitshow.
Gondalf - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Likely you have some problems with Sunny Cove that is clearly superior than Zen 2 even without fast desktop DRAM and without an insane amount of L3.Pretty certain you are trying to realize how fast will be Ice Lake EP in server space.
The end of a dream??? Yes it is.
Obviously Intel is preparing itself to finer nodes that will not allow fast clock speeds anymore but an intersting density instead.
This review is a nice example of what will be the future Intel core performance cadence in the next two years.
Many thanks Haifa Team.
About GPU, it is pretty good because now it performs at 15W level and without an expensive eDRAM. Try to run the new GPU within 28W and you will have an idea of the advantages of the new ark vs. 9.5.
0ldman79 - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Brakdoo is way off in his assertions, but I believe you have rose colored glasses too.Intel got the efficient process working, not the high performance one. They still have 14nm planned out for another year at least.
It isn't just the lithography that is the problem either, Sunny Cove is a different architecture, it just might not clock as high. We'll have to wait and see how that all works out.
I do agree though, speeds are probably going to stall if not regress moving forward. It's just a lot of amps going through a tiny circuit. 14nm might have been the sweet spot to get the highest clock speeds. Smaller circuits will only get hotter carrying the same current. Unless they significantly lower power usage it is going to be a problem.
Apparently .7v is the switching point for silicon semi-conductors, below that the transistors don't switch, so to go beyond 7nm or 5nm they're very likely going to have to move to a more conductive material to lower the switching point as well as resistance (heat buildup).
Interesting times...
Alistair - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
I find partisanship frustrating. You are absolutely right that we just got IPC but bad frequency from both AMD and Intel, so it is nice to see the IPC side of things, but we should be able to criticize Intel without someone brushing us off as being AMD supporters or some nonsense. The new products (these mobile chips in particular) are not very good. Still should be polite to Ian Cutress, he does do fantastic work.I guess I didn't get the memo that no 6 core ultra low voltage parts were coming. I'm very disappointed in the very tiny gains this year. I'm waiting for a good 6 core CPU at 25 watts.
0ldman79 - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Welcome to the Internet, where voicing an opinion on anything gets you labeled as a fanboy/X political party.Every good forum needs a block button... lol
eva02langley - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
The difference here is that Ryzen 3000 clock higher than 2000.... little difference...Alistair - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Absolutely at least AMD's chips clock the same or an extra 100 mhz higher, Intel's new chips clock several hundred mhz slower, making them really poor this year. Making 6 core options more important than ever. 4 cores in this situation are really useless without a large price drop.0ldman79 - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
This is also the efficient line of chips. Last I heard they got the efficient transistor design going but not the high performance one.They may clock higher, they may be limited by the architecture. Dunno. Could entirely be because they packed the chip too tight, the hotspots that spike the Zen 2 temps may actually be causing significant issues with 10nm. In this case the whole "transistors per sq mm" argument may become moot. Packing them in so tight they can't displace heat properly is a bad thing and may be what is happening here.
HStewart - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
I think you to give both Ian and Intel more credit, there is no doubt that Intel has some struggles with going to 10nm but this is first part of the recovery. The results here are extremely impressive especially that these products are low power laptop and not large desktop gaming machines.It would be interesting to compare the new Dell XPS 13 2in1 against existing dell XPS 15 2in1 in which the 15 2in1 has higher power cpu and GPU. I would say it likely with results here, the 13 2in1 has chance of beating the 15 2in1
It going to be interesting to see what 45W laptops are like and the desktop chips on Sunny Cove.
eva02langley - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Give Intel credit... HAHAHAHAHAHA.... they don't deserve any credit. These directors just want to have the stock rise to have a better pay check. Everything they do is biased with this in mind.unclevagz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Public company senior management want stock price rises for bigger bonuses, in other news water is wet.Xyler94 - Sunday, August 4, 2019 - link
Water cannot be wet, funny enough. "Wet" is the property of an object that has come in contact with a liquid, most notibly water, since water cannot be I contact with itself to cause wetness, water is therefore, not wet. :PPhynaz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Dumbassunclevagz - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
I am assuming that Ice lake-Us aren't all i7s, because that's what the first page table is listing.Also, when you have more time, would it be possible to put spec2k6/2k17 test results of other processors at 3.9ghz for a more direct IPC comparison? Not to mention it'd be nice to list results from mobile SoCs (A12, SD855 etc) just for reference as well.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Thanks!DanNeely - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
The first table of CPUs lists all the models as i7, not i7/5/3 as described in the article text.ToTTenTranz - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Is it my impression or the 15-25W TDP switch is only affecting the CPU power budget while leaving the GPU intact?It's making no difference in gaming workloads except for the WoW benchmark, where at >200 FPS we're clearly looking at a CPU-limited scenario.
What's VRS? The Variable Rate Shading test from 3dmark? Could that somehow be CPU-limited too?
Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Correct on the CPU budget.For variable rate shading, see here: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14514/examining-int...
I'll update the article too
ToTTenTranz - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Thanks for the response Ian.Did you ask them if this is something Intel will tweaking this further?
It seems that the 25W mode is leaving a lot of GPU performance on the table, and in GPU-intensive tasks they'd gain a lot more by keeping the CPU power budget intact while providing more headroom for higher clocks on the GPU.
This would be akin to what AMD is doing with mobile Raven Ridge and Picasso, but Intel has a major bandwidth advantage here.
Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
I'm not sure how well the GPU clocks if you push the power. We haven't seen many Intel mobile IGPs go above 1100/1150 in quite a while. I wonder if there's a limit there, or simply Intel needed a minimum CPU performance and whatever was left went to the GPU.Lots of ways to slice it. Only Intel knows for sure.
eastcoast_pete - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Plus, the iGPU will likely run into the speed limitations of having to use system RAM. Not sure how far one has to push the 64 EUs before they start to do the silicon equivalent of twiddling their thumbs waiting for the memory. Might be an interesting thing to test once Ice Lake is released into the wild.0ldman79 - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
I'd like to see a comparison of the iGPU vs the Gen9 iGPU.It's more powerful per EU and there are a little over twice as many EU vs the previous models. That being said, the 530 was decent, I could play games at 720P low settings with decent framerates, but even at 3 times the performance that's still not enough to play those games at 1080p.
SoulShadow - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
How does Ice Lake look with an eGPU setup? Is it still going to be mediocre?Been thinking about dumping my Ryzen 7 1700 desktop and tossing the 1080ti into an eGPU enclosure with a laptop.
Would be far more convenient I'm just concerned about bad performance loss from moving to a 25/45w cpu
HStewart - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
I actually think the Ice Lake with eGPU setup would be quite nice, even without it - I believe with performance numbers that Dell XPS 13 2in1 could possibly give my Dell XPS 15 2in1 a run for its money.Also I curious with Thunderbolt 3 on the CPU now if any performance - keep in mind this is basically future USB4
One thing I saw related to SigGraph 2019, is AVX512 enhancements for 3d graphics processing coming in 3d ( not gaming but professional content creation ) world that it as 2x performance improvement on older systems - not sure how much this applies to Ice Lake system and require Xe to make it function
https://software.intel.com/en-us/siggraph/2019-ove...
RSAUser - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Tossing your GPU into an enclosure to run via thunderbolt is not a good idea, you're going to be heavily limited due to the added latency. It's a solution you only do as you are constantly traveling and never use the desktop while your laptop can't even run basic games.Phynaz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
What added latency. It’s pciegglaw - Sunday, August 4, 2019 - link
There are several decent reviews of eGPU enclosures out fairly recently - my conclusion from all of them was how INCONVENIENT it would be considering the size of the enclosures, total cost of the setup, and not a single enclosure I've seen reviewed matches the regular desktop performance. I would not travel with the eGPU, and if I'm at home a small micro-ATX build or ITX build ends up less cluttered and using a smaller footprint than a laptop + eGPU at a fraction of the price with better performance.sing_electric - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
There's an issue with CPU names in the 1st table ("Intel 10nm Ice Lake-U Series CPUs"):All the chips are listed as "Core i7" before their suffixes. When reading the new name nomenclature, I was like "wait, Intel's using Core i7 for.... everything now?" Later tables don't have this problem, though.
Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Should be fixed :)sing_electric - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Much easier to read! And good that Intel's not using... "brand inflation?"ShowsOn - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
The two different (?) shades of dark blue makes these charts very hard to understand. Accept the faster dark blue bars are the 9900K, but it is just visually confusing.Ryan Smith - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
You make a good point. We've changed the SPEC charts so that all products use distinct colors. Thanks!zodiacfml - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
yawn. 10nm for nothing except the better IGP. they could have at least made it at least 6 core at lower clock speeds but more performance than last gen. at the same TDP. in fairness, this 10nm die is probably larger than AMD's single Ryzen 3000 7nm dieHStewart - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Keep in mind AMD 7nm die does not mean higher transistors than Intel 10nm Because under different process companies. Lower number does not always mean betterzodiacfml - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
I'm saying that Intel's die/wafer is probably larger than AMD's 7nm die considering the decent IGP that comes with the Intel chip. I realized my comment is pointless though considering AMD has not released a 7nm APU yet for a proper comparison.Phynaz - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Yawn, another AMD troll that doesn’t know what a laptop is.Tyler_Durden_83 - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
My God these new ICL parts are, considering the wait, even more yawn than the 2080 super was...shabby - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
I think it would be smart to wait for retail laptops to hit the market before drawing a conclusion on ice lake, who knows what tweaks this ringer laptop from intel has.GreenReaper - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Having the fan running on full all the time is kinda cheating to start with. You wouldn't actually want that as a laptop experience. However, the laptops were actually designed for OS testing (where you typically want to avoid throttling to have clean data) so I can cut them a bit of slack there.masimilianzo - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
I am sorry it was not clear to me if the 3.9GHz turbo frequency was kept for all the duration of the Spec2k6/2k17 benchmark runs.prophet001 - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Any idea on when desktop SKUs will be coming?Eris_Floralia - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
If you are talking about traditional socketed DT parts, the answer is never.DanNeely - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
There aren't any 10nm desktop parts on leaked roadmaps out to 2021.If you trust the leaks from Semi-Accurate there probably never will. Of the 4 planned 10nm fabs one was upgraded to 14nm (from an even older process); one or two others are getting 7nm tooling. That leaves 10nm capacity at 25-50% of originally planned numbers meaning they're never going to make 10nm in high volume which in turn means that large chunks of the market will probably go directly to 7 in a few years after lingering at 14.
KAlmquist - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
So Intel has produced a significant jump in IPC for for the first time in a long while, but they aren't going to bring it to the desktop any time soon. 7nm is targeted for 2021, but even if it is delivered on time the plan is to initially use it for data center products (a General-Purpose Graphics Processing Unit, to be followed by some Xeon processors). I've been expecting Ryzen 3XXX prices to fall over the next six months, but AMD may have no reason to reduce prices if Intel isn't planning to compete.Comagnum - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
These processors look.. unimpressive.PeachNCream - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Yup.Arbie - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
The gaming results section would really benefit from a clear statement of the video resolution in each case (I didn't see that anywhere in the article), and at least one comparison to a discrete graphics card.Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
It's there in the title of the graphArbie - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
I've been through too many generations of monitors, I guess. The default now would be 16:9 so the title bar numbers are clear enough. Except World of Tanks resolution wasn't apparently listed; but that's rare enough that I doubt it would be much use in comparing to other GPUs.Elstar - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
This appears to be an editing error:"POPCNT Microcode 50% faster than SW (under L1-D size)"
The comment must apply to something other than POPCNT (which is trivial to implement). I'd wager this comment refers "REP MOVS" given the next line is about "REP STOS".
nivedita - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
“Throughout most of the last decade, Intel has kept the same cache configuration among its server cores with very few changes, aside from improving the micro-op cache through Sandy Bridge today, but with Sunny Cove, we get some key updates.“Didn’t the cache hierarchy change considerably in skylake, with l2 growing and l3 becoming non-inclusive? Or am I misremembering?
Elstar - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
You're thinking about the server variant of Skylake. This article is about the "client" variant of Skylake (i.e. the one with integrated graphics, etc) and therefore the commentary about caches is valid.psychobriggsy - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
1. Still months from availability, so this is a very early preview. This is obviously going to bring up cries of paper launch and Intel marketing, but no website would have turned it down. I don't think the article is kind.2. Gains are negligible.
3. Lower base clocks, all-core turbo and 1C turbos are highly concerning for the 10nm process compared to Whiskey Lake.
4. 'extra binning required' for the 28W SKU means that not many dies can make this, this is the 10nm limit for Intel.
5. AVX512 is a beast
6. Better GPU drags Intel from being way-behind to not being an embarrassment.
Rookierookie - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Other reports have indicated that Ice Lake graphics actually beats Vega, so...psychobriggsy - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Except you've been able to get Zen APUs for a long time, and this isn't out yet. For all we know, Zen 2 APU will arrive in a similar timeframe. But it is good that it is competitive.Phynaz - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
AMD laptop parts have always been garbageFulljack - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
they're now in the same ballpark with integrated vega graphics.still, looking at oem, they'll probably add mx250 or gtx 1650 max-q.
StormyParis - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
They'll be, in 6 months, assuming this demo unit can be produced at scale, priced competitively, and AMD doesn' t improve in the mean time.I understand why Anand did this review, and I enjoyed it, but it is really about Intel making vague promises in the hope we don't all buy AMD stuff for our 2-3-4-5 yearly upgrade in the next 6 months. And then we'll do it anyway ;-p
Fulljack - Sunday, August 4, 2019 - link
sadly, oem doesn't push amd based laptop as much as intel based laptop.just recently we've got ryzen 3000 (zen+) laptop, despite it's released early this year. it only improve performance over previous generation by ~10%, but it greatly improves battery life though.
GNUminex_l_cowsay - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
For once the Civ VI graphics benchmark actually tells us something useful; but would it kill you guys give turn time numbers?Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Didn't have time, we're we're running to the edge with the game numbers.zealvix - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Any news/dates for the desktop releases?And graphics seem only abit better than the iris plus 655 in my NUC, but a large part of that is from the increased bandwidth as well.
Any news of a 2 tflop or at least 1.7+ tflop variant of the graphics to match the best from ryzen mobile?
psychobriggsy - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
That would require Intel to design a SKU with 96EUs at least.That doesn't exist, and likely won't on 14/10nm.
AMD is likely months away from 7nm Zen 2 APU with over 2 TFLOPS, assuming memory bandwidth to feed it (I truly hope they have LPDDR4X support for their mobile APUs).
Fulljack - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
lpddr4 would make it higher priced and stuck in premium device, as it's a soldered ram.RSAUser - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
I think the commenter means DDR4L, low powered SO-DIMM and not the usual phone/tablet soldered RAM.Rudde - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
There are rumors (check AT forums) about a Gen 12 (ice lake is 11) discrete gpu with 512 EUs (arctic sound). I believe 64 EUs is confirmed max on Ice lake, but the generation after that (Tiger lake?) might have more.Mr Perfect - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
I notice that these parts all have Hyper threading. Has Intel addressed their security concerns with HT in Ice Lake, or do they see the benefits of HT to be greater then the risks in the mobile space?djayjp - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
And what about Zombieload...? Or was that just quietly swept under the rug?justaviking - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
QUOTE: "After attending the event, to which fewer than 10 press were invited, I now understand why. Some of the press invited didn’t have OS images, didn’t bring benchmarks with them, and were quite happy to go along with the flow. Intel provided benchmarks like Geekbench and 3DMark, which those press with their audiences were happy to run. I came prepared with both a new 1903 OS image and my benchmark suite, ready to rock and roll."And that is why we love AnandTech. :)
justaviking - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
And QUOTE: "It was clear that some of the press in attendance only needed a day (or half a day), but for what we do at AT, then two days would be better."Thank you for the article, and for doing the best you could in the time available.
ManDaddio - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Well I'm glad that we got a little bit more looking to this part of Intel's 10nm. I'm looking forward to the next iteration to be honest.Actually I was more interested in the features of these new Intel laptops.
The benchmarks as you stated are just surface stuff until you can actually truly spend a while testing these things when they come out.
All the rave right now in some circles is AMD but I always liked Intel laptops for their features as well as performance.
And I have owned a couple AMD laptops. They were good and did the job but my Intel laptops were always much better. That's my experience.
I understand the challenges of putting an article like this out to the public who complains a lot or just wants to troll. Thanks for sharing.
Bulat Ziganshin - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
>AMD for Zen 2 decided to halve the L1-D, double increase the L1-D associativityit was L1-I cache
Drumsticks - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
In terms of pure performance, Icelake is definitely let down by it's available frequency. It's in bad need of a 10nm++ process or a backport to 14nm.It was a good idea to release it for laptops though, I think. Laptops definitely are about more than just the CPU, and the overall experience the Icelake featureset enables might actually be a good selling point.
I'd love to see an Icelake based microarchitecture released on Intel 14+++ though. Even though 14+++ has been around forever, I think it's still a good node. It's still completely untouched by any other node in frequency, power consumption isn't as important to desktop users, and the node must be so optimized by now that costs are good even with bigger dies.
The_Assimilator - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Not to mention that all Intel's CPU fabs have been on 14nm for so long that the capital costs are long paid off.I think we will see ICL on desktop via 14nm, simply because Intel can't afford to not compete with Zen 2. We won't get the full 20% IPC uplift because Intel will have to spend some of that to deal with 14nm's power/heat issues at high frequencies, but even a 10% bump would be enough to decisively regain the performance crown from Zen 2.
dwbogardus - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Pretty much every major architectural change and most every process shrink Intel has made over decades has initially resulted in only very modest improvements. But over time, as volumes and yields improved, they did process tweaks and minor die spins, and the yield had higher frequencies gradually improved. The very first Pentiums/Pentium Pro's struggled to out-perform the then-fastest 80486DX2-66's, on then-existing applications. There has been a slow, by consistently steady over decades improvement in IPC, and generally in frequency, with temporary setbacks in frequency at each new process introduction. But over time, they always ratchet up, with the cumulative effect over the years being very dramatic. While we're all surprised and disappointed that it has taken as long as it has for Intel to get 10 nm out, no one should be surprised that initial yields and frequencies are very modest. They always are, but they always improve, and in the case of 14 nm, they managed to improve them so much that they have been hard to let go of and move on from. In fact, 14 nm is still the best fit for some applications, and will remain so for so time.nevcairiel - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Unfortunately Intel decided a long time ago to not bother to backport Ice Lake to 14nm. Ice Lake had been "done" for years, basically, afterall.On the other hand, they did say that in the future, and with growing uncertainty of process gains, they want to develop architectures in a manner more independent from the actual process, so hopefully Ice Lake is the last µarch thats very tightly married to its process.
hbsource - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Was that an HST reference with the Good Thing trademark?konbala - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
How does Integer Scaling working out to be? Really curious, can’t wait to play games smoothly at low res.Alistair - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Kind of what we were expecting, which isn't much. 3 percent ST gains. Can now play AAA titles at 720p at 19fps... not exciting. We don't even get an upgrade from 4 to 6 cores at the same price, like what happened in the desktop. Terrible if you ask me. Guess I'll be keeping my laptop another year.twotwotwo - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Curious if this ends up a return to Intel's old routine or if there's still constrained supply, etc. In particular, the longer 10nm server chips take to arrive, the longer AMD could grow off server revenue.Two tick+tocks a few weeks apart! Busy times for AT, heh.
trivik12 - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Obviously AMD Loons are nervous. Intel will ultimately figure out process issues and then AMD will be back where they were few years back.Alistair - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Maybe you didn't understand what you just read. This is the smallest improvement in CPU performance that Intel has had for years in mobile. Go look at that image again.https://images.anandtech.com/doci/14664/Blueprint%...
maroon1 - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
The iGPU gain is massiveAlistair - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
These comments are funny. The iGPU is not the CPU part I care about. I said "this is the smallest improvement in CPU ("CPU") performance that Intel has had for years in mobile" which is still true regardless of the GPU nobody needs.Phynaz - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
It only matches a 3900xAlistair - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Again, last year's 14nm chips matched the 3900x in SINGLE THREADED (not MT) performance, so if this one does too, how does that matter? Why try to talk about how great a new CPU is, when it is the smallest improvement we've seen in years?Alistair - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
10nm was an opportunity to see 6 cores, but we didn't get it this year. These new CPUs are not useful. Waiting for next year's Intel instead...Phynaz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
These are laptop chips, idiotKorguz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
and a laptop cant have more then 4 cores ?? let me guess phynaz, you still believe intels BS about 4 cores is all the mainstream needs ?? intels previous laptop cpus had more then 4 cores, IE 9850H for example with 6 cores.RSAUser - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
"matches". In single-threaded performance with fans at 100% in pretty much the most ideal circumstances it can ever reach. Cool.Phynaz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Intel’s laptop cpu keeping up with AMD top desktop offerings. You must be worried.Alistair - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
"Intel's laptop SINGLE CORE cpu performance is keeping up with Intel's desktop chips, you must be worried" you can't make up this kind of stupidity, and you call me an idiot.eva02langley - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Ahhhh man... this is barely better than the 3700u.zodiacfml - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Yes and No. Intel at 10nm should have made AMD nervous but products only at 4 cores, there is nothing or little benefit with 10nm. I reckon, AMD's 7nm mobile parts will mostly start at 6 cores.Kevin G - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Those 3D particle movement tests seem to be too good to be true. There should be a gigantic jump due to an optimized AVX-512 code path and ICL's enhanced caching structure but it is beyond that in the comparison. I'm not actually suspecting the ICL system given the disclosures in the article (odd that the note about AVX-512 intrinistics for the 3DPM test is mentioned around SPEC compiler settings) but rather the other test systems. Where the Whisky Lake or Kaby Lake systems power or thermal constrained at all? On those Hauwei laptops, were you able to set their fan to a fixed 100% to match that of the ICL system?Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
The AVX-512 tests were similar when we compared Cannon Lake to Kaby Lake at the same frequency. Against unoptimized SSE code, AVX-512 is killer.Kevin G - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Getting a bit more than double the performance from AVX2 vs. AVX-512 should be possible using some of the new Ice Lake extensions and the obvious doubling of SIMD width. But going from a score of 1802 in Whiskey Lake 25W to 9242 for Ice Lake 25W, over a factor of 5! Ice Lake would have to remove some other bottleneck that the 3DPM test hits really hard (division?).Looking back at your previous reviews ( https://www.anandtech.com/show/13400/intel-9th-gen... ), you can see a similar speed up from AVX-512 between the i9 9900K and the i9 7820X but that is explained from Skylake-X having both double the SIMD width and double the number of SIMD execution units. The client version of Ice Lake shouldn't have the same AVX-512 throughput as Sky Lake server.
CSMR - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
> the one area where Ice Lake excels in is graphics. Moving from 24 EUs to 64 EUs, plus an increase in memory bandwidth to >50 GB/s, makes for some easy reading.I don't understand the comparison here and in this article. If you say a high-end intel processor update excels in graphics, you should compare to previous high-end processors (e.g. i7-8559U with Iris Plus 655). These have 48EUs not 24 and have 128MB EDRAM at 100 GB/s unlike the Ice Lake.
I am very interested in how the best Ice Lake processors compare to the best previous-gen processors, not how they compare to mediocre previous-gen processors.
Could the article be updated with some appropriate comparisons?
eastcoast_pete - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Agree on adding the best previous generation graphics to the comparison. Also, while the over 1 TFlops for the 64EU Gen 11 sounds (and is) impressive (within the Intel iGPU world) , didn't the 48EU with Crystal Well get close to that already?Rudde - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
The first apu with 1TFlops performance statement is full of asteriks. First, you have to exclude AMD; second, you have to exclude Intel Iris gpus with eDRAM.Phynaz - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
AMD mobile chips are hot garbageeva02langley - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Your opinion is not a fact... and it is garbage for real.Phynaz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Hahaha. It’s a fact. It’s why they have 0% market share.eastcoast_pete - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Ian and Andrei, thanks for the article (Ian) and the tests (both) ! My take on why Intel did this "we let you play (test) with our reference system is that they needed to show that Ice Lake is for real, has working graphics, and not another gimped chip that is send off to pasture like Whiskey Lake. Overall, it seems to be an okay step forward, nothing great, but a step forward. For me, the main benefit of this new generation is AVX 512, which can speed certain programs up quite a lot.Lastly, Intel will sell a lot of these, mainly because AMD doesn't have a real competitive solution out there that can take them on in the low and lower power mobile space.
DooMMasteR - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Which makes this unusual showcase even weirder...Intel is so far only planning a low power mobile release (either because of platform restrictions, Ryzen has shown that 7nm needs complex thermal management) or because of fab volume restrictions in 10nm.
In either case Intels benefit from this showcase is quite small since AMD has no real contender announced anyways.
At least when people where looking for pure SoC performance... and in any other case AMD can still compete quite well, but lacks product variety and quality, Huawei has shown that amazing Ryzen mobile devices are possible and Lenovo and others have shown how to do it wrong.
The_Assimilator - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
While it's great that Intel is being so open about ICL, the sad thing is that it only highlights how bare their cupboard is at the moment. This is their second attempt at 10nm, yet it's so obviously inferior to the ultra-refined 14nm, which makes it clear that despite Intel's half-decade of massive expense and effort, their 10nm node isn't salvageable.I predict we'll see 14nm desktop ICL parts for Christmas, but I'm far more interested in what happens after 10nm. Does Intel have a plan to use all the hard-won experience on this failed node to make their next shrink actually happen on time and on schedule, or is the company in so deep that its decision-makers can't see any alternative route?
ksec - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Just looking at those numbers, Icelake, while on average may be 20% faster, it is in fact some of the work load manage to get 30 to 40+% IPC increase. That is quite astonishing. And depending on AVX512 usage it could get even more performance out of it.What we need to know is die size.
GPU has improved but stilll isn't good enough.
Phynaz - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Nothing from intel will ever be good enough for you unless it’s stamped AMDKorguz - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
and by your own comments so far in this thread, nothing will ever be good enough for you, unless its stamped intel, whats your point ?Phynaz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
I was waiting for you to show up. I’ll bet I’ve bought more AMD chips than you can count.Korguz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
you have ?? that's great, good for you, you must be proud of your self, knowing you have more money then brains. my self.. would prefer to pay my mortgage, food, and other things that are neededPhynaz - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
Sorry, I forgot you’re poor.Korguz - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
sorry phynaz, not poor. just have better things to spend my money on, cause unlike you, i dont still live with mommy and daddy, cause the way you insult people, and call them names, you must be some 15 year old, as this is what children do. maybe you should go away, grow up, and come back when you can talk to people with out resorting to insults, and childish behavior. 90% of your posts in this thread prove this, nothing but insults, does this make you feel better, calling people names and insulting them ?Phynaz - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
And it’s “than” not “then”. Perhaps your lack of grammar is part of your problem.Korguz - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
um ya ok sure.. anything you say...HStewart - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Is useless to argue with AMD fans - they first state that 10nm is old fashion and that claims of 30% is based on 2015 Sky Lake cpus and when they find out it based on 8th generation they don't believe and then state G{U is not good enough. And that AVX 512 does not matter, bug Siggraph 2019 is going to change that.But people forget about the past, yes AMD did it 64 bit back in the older days when nobody care much about greater than 4G memory. They build memory management and we had the frequency wars with Pentium 4 days - but Intel came back with I Series and change ever. Past is be repeated again. But this time is the core wars but Ice Lake is beginning of iSeries like in those days.
Please keep in mind this is only the low power cpus that Intel has release - it only the top of iceburg.
HStewart - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
"G{U is not good enough. And that AVX 512 does not matter, bug Siggraph 2019"I wish we could edit, I am older so my eyes are not as good
"GPU is not good enough. And that AVX 512 does not matter, but SigGraph 2019"
Korguz - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
and its just a useless to argue with intel fans, right HStewart ?? you know 1st hand about that, as you are well known now to praise intel any chance you get, and seemingly forget the negative things intel has one over the years, especially the ones that cost intel a few billion dollars...HStewart - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Lets just keep Intel articles to Intel only and AMD articles to AMD only - not of this fan boy BS, I support Intel primary because the AMD fans are so rude to Intel supports and I will never support them because of that. I do change, I use to support only Apple and hated Android - but I change on that one primary because I saw that Apple was not changing it UI and that they require developer tools on Mac's. I not actually Intel fan, Intel user and Intel developer - that is different. I have 30 years development experience.jospoortvliet - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
You know, nobody cares about your ‘support’. If you mean your support to help intel - it merely serves to make it look pathetic. If you have nothing intelligent to offer besides your ‘support’, whichever brand or product it is to benefit, you better just stay out of the conversation as that would improve its average quality substantially.I’m sure there are sites where comments from brand- supporting fans are appreciated. I sure as hell don’t read the comments here for that reason but to get insights and your comments just serve to make that harder as i need to weed through countless pointless conversations which involve you ‘supporting’ intel by lowering the collective intelligence of all readers here. Do everyone a favor and leave.
Korguz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
your are hilarious HStewart, maybe you should take your OWN advice for once.. oh wait.. you CAN'T cause you cant deal with the fact that intel isnt doing as good as it was before zen came out. when you stop with the intel fanboy BS, then maybe the rest of us will as well. no, you support intel cause you are a fanatic when it comes to them. " I not actually Intel fan " BS complete BS, and you have proved over AND over again, you are an intel fan.30 years of experience ?? BS, you dont know the DIFFERENCE between WATTS and VOLTS, and you KEEP spelling architeCture WRONG
Qasar - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
" they first state that 10nm is old fashion and that claims of 30% is based on 2015 Sky Lake cpus and when they find out it based on 8th generation they don't believe " who is they ?? to be fair HStewart, most of intels iGP, were best suited for any thing that isnt games that arent played on facebook, or games that are a few years old, and office work. but looks like intel is trying to improve that :-)" yes AMD did it 64 bit back in the older days when nobody care much about greater than 4G memory " i can remember a few people wanting to be able to use more then 4 gigs of ram in their comps, with out having to go to server platforms, i was one of them, and a few of my friends did too.
" Please keep in mind this is only the low power cpus that Intel has release " from what i have read, seems like this is all intel can do with their current 10nm process right now, looks like intel, like with the desktop, thinks quad cores are " good enough ", cause if it isnt, why are these only quad core ? why not up the ante to 6 cores ? i guess, like the desk top, we have to wait to see if amd will do this...
RSAUser - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
AVX512 really doesn't matter as I would find it strange for people to run such workloads on their laptops rather than on dedicated machines with way more processing power.For the common man, AVX512 does nothing though, but we can argue that most of the performance improvements don't really matter, I'm still using a device 5 years old with an i7 4720HQ and I feel no need to upgrade, only thing I am let down by is the graphics card (960M).
Intel will have a hard time convincing people to upgrade for this stuff before their machines basically keel over.
Klimax - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Audio/Video processing on the go. Those areas tend to get support for new extensions pretty fast. Maybe browsers. Microsoft has for a while supported AVX512 for codegen. Maybe graphics drivers might use it too. (Not sure how it is now, but Intel was pretty bad in using available instructions in their drivers.)Kevin G - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
It is also about ISA parity. This has been on of my running issues with x86 as a whole is that the ecosystem tends to spit out a new 'major' extension every two or three years and then segment it to certain parts of the market (AVX has yet to appear on Celerons, Atoms, Pentium etc. after 8 years of being availible on Sandy Bridge). The software development side would have more incentive to optimize code for AVX is it was universally available and they didn't have to worry about a new extension on on the horizon.*I should clarify that I am referring to user space ISA extensions here. New platforms etc. will likely introduce a handful of kernel and hypervisor extensions with every iteration but those should only matter to OS and driver developers.
Phynaz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Wrong wrong wrong.eva02langley - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Man, you two are easily the worst fanboys of all. Unable to see the big picture, only cherry picking whatever make sense to live in your delusional world of flying dinosaurs and laser sharks.Korguz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
how so eva02langley ?? to be fair.. ive seen the same from youHulk - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Great write-up Ian! Thank you so much for doing this. I have been reading a CPU reviews since 1998 so I think I know a thing or two about a good CPU review.wut - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Intel's being nice (because of the new people it hired) and this is what it gets- More criticism. Can't win, huhn? Post one article and one big troll strolls in the first minute.HStewart - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Ian,First of all, I think you did a wonderful and well down performance preview of Ice Lake mobile chips.
But I do have some important realistic question, especially with long history of issues with Intel going to 10nm
1. First of all, did Intel successfully overcome this hurdle? I am not yet sure they did for larger models - mostly like 2020 and more cores
2. Are all of Spectre/Meltdown security issues been fix with Ice Lake, personally no body has yet send a realistic virus on this stuff and appears that Intel has fix them all in this cpu.
3. IPC person people claimed it measurements were again 2015 Skylake cpu and you review indicates 8th generation cpus which sounds more likely
4/ AVX-512 has amazing results especially in one of benchmark, one of reason I got into CPU's and stuff, is because 3d content create, I think we see a new software in that area because SigGraph 2019/.
5. Internal Thunderbolt 3, yes it cost saving and yes we know USB4 is around the corner supporting it, but is there any performance advantages on the chip
5. I would to see performance test of new Dell XPS 13 2in1 against the Dell XPS 15 2in1, Even the 15 2in1 has higher power CPU and possibly GPU, I have feeling the new XPS 13 2in1 will give it a run for money, just for kicks you add the old 13 2in1
6, I am curious about what the performance of Y versions of Ice Lake will be like, not much was stated on it - how they compare to u.
7. Of course interested and curious about 35/45W versions of Ice Lake, I would say they will be out in early 2020.
Finally do you every see the merge of desktop chips and mobile chips, with power getting lower I would think that one day desktop chips would basically be the same as mobile.
eva02langley - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Nobody read that... just saying...HStewart - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Does any body truly reads these comments any way.. the Articles are great but comments are just opinions and every one has one.jospoortvliet - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Sometimes people have insightful additions or questions. That is never you so I wouldn’t miss your ‘input’.Phynaz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
But yet you replied. Doh!Korguz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
and so did you !!! :-)Phynaz - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
Your comprehension skills aren’t that great, are they. Maybe that’s why you can’t afford a good cpu. Did you finish school?Korguz - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
yep.. but you obliviously havent as only children resort to insults, like you do. and again.. grow upPOlaris1983 - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Thermals and TDP are a test for UNdervolting and OCing on THICC laptops using ai windows OS GUI interface apps for easy one button flipping on and off for these CPUs and GPUs and RAM Timings customizations. Even for desktop towers soon using keyboard functions in special keys like on a laptop once they solve the luqid cooling issues on the THICC laptops.thetrashcanisfull - Thursday, August 1, 2019 - link
Ian,In this and the Ryzen 3000 review, I noticed that the 3DPM benchmarks with AVX enabled seem to benefit from AVX-512 much more than I would anticipate.
If I'm understanding things correctly, the AVX-512 parts are capable of 2x512b FMAC / cycle in the case of Skylake-server or 1x512b FMAC + 1x512b ALU / cycle in the case of Sunny Cove, with both handling 2x512b load + 1x512b store / cycle. This would suggest to me that their vector FP performance/cycle ought to be around double that of Skylake-client or Zen 2, both of which do 2x256b FMAC / cycle and 2x256b loads + 1x256b store / cycle. However, in the 3DPM benchmark we see AVX-512 CPUs outpace the performance/cycle of AVX2 CPUs by a factor of 4 - possibly even more than 4, once we account for the frequency penalties associated with AVX-512!
Am I misunderstanding some critical piece of the AVX-512 extension that explains this boost, or is there something wrong with the AVX2 codepath for this benchmark? Only using xmm instructions? Not using FMA instructions?
Mysticial - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
A while back, Ian sent me the non-vectorized and AVX512-vectorized binaries for 3DPM for me to analyze. (I never looked at the AVX2 version since this was before it was made.)Based on what I saw, I'm not at all surprised by the result. While I can't say that it fully explains such a large difference between AVX2 and AVX512, there are at least two things I noticed in the AVX512 binary that would contribute towards it.
1. There are 64-bit integer multiplies. AVX512 has the vpmullq instruction. AVX2 does not. Emulating this instruction in AVX2 is *extremely* costly.
2. The ratio of "heavy" to "light" AVX512 instructions is very low. Therefore, the 2nd FMA isn't needed to gain on AVX2.
I've never analyzed the AVX2 binary itself to see how that 64-bit multiply is being handled. It could be vectorized with extreme overhead, not vectorized at all, or worked-around at an algorithmic level.
thetrashcanisfull - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
ohhhh... That makes more sense. I assumed that the 3DPM benchmark was doing primarily floating point math. I also didn't realize that AVX2 didn't support packed 64b muls... Thanks for the info!Alexvrb - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
"The suggested PL2 for Kaby Lake-R was 44W, so this might indicate a small jump in strategy."Yeah, whereby TDP is virtually meaningless and every machine is a complete mystery box until you buy it and discover what actual thermals/power/performance are like - again regardless of the TDP. This is all without overclocking, mind you.
Phynaz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
What? TDP doesn’t mean what you think it does.Alexvrb - Monday, August 5, 2019 - link
I didn't feel like quoting the entire paragraph. But please DO elaborate. Then tell me how useful TDP is when they let OEMs set PL2 and Tau to... anything, really. You can take two "95W" processors and their power and thermals under load are radically different across a range of mainboards. The is reflected in mobile as well, where they let OEMs do pretty much whatever - the results aren't constrained by the processor no matter what the claimed TDP is. That doesn't even COUNT overclocking.Meanwhile AMD chips don't hand over control to mainboards unless you ARE overclocking, which is how it SHOULD be.
Alistair - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
I didn't see any discussion or comparison vs. the i7-9850H. Let's see a 28W TDP version of the 6 core i7-9850H put against these new chips. Same money, 50 percent more cores. Anyone in their right mind should be looking for an i7-9850H or 9750H laptop instead over these 10nm products. Where is the 6 core 10nm CPU? Don't buy a 4 cores laptop if you're looking for good performance in 2019-2020 imo.If you want a 4 core laptop get a cheaper 14nm based laptop. If you want performance get a 6 core. I really really don't see the point in these products.
Alexvrb - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
They gotta do *something* with all those 10nm wafers. Ian can't eat them all, and China said they don't want any more half-baked 10nm products after the last go-around. Maybe in 2020 we'll see 10nm++ and it will be as good as phase one 10nm was supposed to be.But yeah, their current 10nm products are a bit disappointing outside of the fatter GPUs and better memory speeds. If you're using something with a dGPU there's little point vs their own 14++, it only starts to make sense if you want AMD-like iGPU performance with the latest Core processor design. Even then that's only limited to models with a high EU count (48+) as the 32 EU models just look meh.
They're going to have some stiff competition when 7nm Zen 2 APUs launch. I guess that's why they're attacking the low-power first, as AMD is still stuck on 12nm rehash Zen+ products for now.
InvidiousIgnoramus - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
I still find it amusing that the architecture with "Ice" in it's name has low clock speeds presumably from power/heat issues.abufrejoval - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Great work! And kudos to AMD to make Intel work so much harder to get good news out!Two die carrier layouts but the chips looking identical:
First of all, I assume that the bigger and square chip is essentially the North-Bridge in 14nm?
And the smaller rectangular one the CPU+iGPU?
And I guess at 64EU we are talking about more than 60% of die area going to iGPU while even at quad core and AES-512 the CPU + cache will be perhaps 30%?
Is there any HSA or GPGPU compute to 'pay' for that iGPU surface and power in professional workloads?
Or is it really just for gaming?
Am I also correct to assume that of the extra thermal budget in the 28Watt parts, none really goes to the CPU, only allows it to stay within the 15 Watt envelope while the iGPU is also running?
Are we talking different die layouts and sizes for dual/quad CPUs and 64/32 iGPU EUs or is it really all just binning, meaning that an Core i3-1000G1 is a chip where 70% surface area of an Core i7-1060G7 failed to make it?
Why am I thinking they are heading down a path without consumer value returns?
I got a Lenovo S730 i7-8565U or Whisky Lake recently for a little over €1000 and I got a couple of J5005 Atoms recently for a little over €100 (admittedly complete notebook vs. RAM less Mini-ITX mainboard). The difference in power is 15 vs 10 Watts.
Both are fairly competent 2D machines even at 4k. Both are terrible gaming machines, but I don't really think that ultrabook portable gaming performance is a selling point.
If I were free to choose CPU vs. GPU real-estate, I'd definitely go left, say 6 or 8 CPU cores or just higher sustained turbos and make do with the J5005's 18 iGPU EUs, because CPU power is what I profit from professionally.
For GPU, every € I spend gets me vastly more gaming experience in less mobile form factors, which is fine: I don't see how I could run in a game and outside without breaking my newest toy.
Sahrin - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
$426 for a quad core in 2019. What a time to be alive.eva02langley - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
So basically... expensive, low yield, 4 cores, low frequency.Outside of better IGPU, barely matching AMD offering, and AVX512, which is not even a matter for a 4 cores CPU, 10nm is an abysmal failure.
Phynaz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
So basically....you’re an imbecileKorguz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
your one to talk phynaz, i guess you want to be stuck on quad cores in notebooks for ever ???Phynaz - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
You guessed wrong, but considering your education level that should be expectedKorguz - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
i did ?? sure seems like you only want quad cores still... my guess, yours is maybe grade 10.AntonErtl - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
I am guessing that SPEC CPU2017 Rate-1 means one copy of the benchmark, so it also gives us single-thread performance (and that explains why the power limit differences do not play a bigger role). Right?One thing that I find remarkable about the recent AMD and Intel launches is that Intel follows the pattern (already seen with Broadwell) of starting a new process with a low clock, and therefore with mobile products and then servers. If they follow their earlier pattern, we will see higher-clocked stuff on 10nm in the future.
By contrast, AMD (and the smartphone SoC vendors) manage to get the same or better clock rates with the newer process as with the older ones.
From what I hear, Intel is very much into hand-tuning their CPUs (that's why backporting Ice Lake to 14nm would be very expensive in terms of both labor and time-to-market), while AMD and the smartphone SoC vendors rely on more automatic tools. What is interesting is that AMD managed to get within a few % of clock rate of a highly tuned Intel chip (with several years of tuning both the process and the layout of the chip) with this more automatic approach, while having a similar IPC.
Intel has been working on Ice Lake and 10nm for a while, and still suffer from a clock rate deficit compared to Whiskey Lake (but in a way, 10nm is just becoming usefully online now, so maybe we should start the clock now). The fact that they have increased the TDP of the Y SKUs and decreased the base clock of the 15W SKUs (from 1.9GHz for the 8665U to 1.3GHz for the 1065G7) indicates that they still have problems being competitive wrt power consumption under load with Whiskey Lake. It will be interesting to see the final products (and compare them to Whiskey Lake and Picasso products with similar power delivery and cooling).
Phynaz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
AMD pushes their overvolted chips to the very limit. Intel doesn’t have to.Korguz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
" Intel doesn’t have to. " um.. i guess you havent seen the articles about how much intels cpus really use then. 95 watts, up to 200 watts in realityPhynaz - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
Wow, you’re really, really dumb. Do you get state aid?Korguz - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
oh how so ?? AT even posted a write up on this, obviously, you havent read it. so you are the one that needs aid, as you are the dumb one here....Alexvrb - Monday, August 5, 2019 - link
Reading isn't Phynaz' strong suit. However when you state a fact he can't counter, he immediately switches to low brow personal attacks - those are really more his speed.mobutu - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
It doesn't mattter (for me), this time I'll buy AMD.HStewart - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Then why comment if it doesn't matter to you.Phynaz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
An AMD laptop?I’m sorry.
peevee - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
"The 1065G7 comes quite close to the fastest desktop parts, however it’s likely it’ll need a desktop memory subsystem in order to catch up in total peak absolute performance."What does it mean exactly? How "desktop memory subsystem" differs from this laptop memory other than module size?
Also, there is compatibility with LPDDR4x? Where are SODIMMs for that?
peevee - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
"The 1065G7 comes quite close to the fastest desktop parts, however it’s likely it’ll need a desktop memory subsystem in order to catch up in total peak absolute performance."What does it mean exactly? How "desktop memory subsystem" differs from this laptop memory other than module size?
Also, there is compatibility with LPDDR4x? Where are SODIMMs for that?
Phynaz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
People on the internet need to learn how to use google.ilkhan - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
At this point I'm still confused if I should be looking for an Ice Lake laptop come christmas, but more objective testing is always a good thing. Thanks Ian.Farfolomew - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
is anyone else irked by Intel’s naming scheme for the Y-series processors? They’re not even ‘Y’ series marked anymore; that’s a thing of the past! They’re now ‘0’ series (zero), and extremely hard to tell at that.Obviously since Broadwell, and the introduction of Core M, intel marketing has been trying to get rid of that brand. Well now they’ve pretty much accomplished that.
HStewart - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Well I think Core M is officially gone with this version. Naming convention make since - note that none of Core M processors including Skylake Y series ever had quad cores. Big difference is power difference 0 series are 9V while U is 15/28 and also 28. It will be interesting comparing Core i7-1065G7 vs Core i7-1060G7 with only differences appearing to be Watts and FreqIn my opinion what is worst is AMD coming out with Ryzen 7, 5, 3 … making people think they have same as i7, i5, i3,,,
Arbie - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Yeah, everybody has been wildly misled by that numbering. When I bought my R7 1800X I thought it would be just like an i7. But instead I got twice the cores, threads, and cache. I hate it when that happens...Thunder 57 - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Hahaha, thanks, that was great! Well done.Phynaz - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
And yet it as slower than the i7. Maybe there’s more to performance than more stuff.Xyler94 - Sunday, August 4, 2019 - link
Slower in games, faster in almost everything else (when the R7 1800X came out, the i7 at the time was the i7 7700k)Just like today, the Ryzen 9 3900x is slightly slower in most games (beating it in others) while smashing the i9 9900k in almost any other task. Funny how now we have two CPUs for two different things, huh? Competition is good~
Thunder 57 - Sunday, August 4, 2019 - link
No point in trying to talk sense into a grade A troll. You would think AMD beat him with a belt as a kid or something.Korguz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
um HStewart, " Big difference is power difference 0 series are 9V while U is 15/28 and also 28." 9 volts??? again.. do you NOT not know the difference between WATTS and VOLTS ?? i guess by YOUR logic, U uses 15 and 28 VOLTS ????quadibloc - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
It's easy to focus on AMD and say that the reason Intel didn't do a pure "tick" release this time was because it couldn't afford to pass up any opportunity for improvement in a more competitive environment. But this forgets another factor: during the years of the "tick-tock" strategy, Dennard Scaling was operative, so a process shrink of itself brought a major performance improvement.Now, without Dennard Scaling, even without serious competition from AMD, if Intel had brought out a process shrink without architectural improvements, people would have said "What's the point?".
0ldman79 - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Ignore the whiners.Good tech preview.
Looking forward to a full on review.
The SPEC numbers vs the 3900x are pretty insane. Is that single thread or what? Are the benches short enough to run within the max turbo power envelope?
I'm trying to understand how a 15W Ice Lake and 15W Whiskey Lake are comparable to a 9900K or 3900x.
Alistair - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Of course it is single threaded (Hence Ian saying words like IPC in that section). There are 0 reasons you'd pick this CPU to compete against the 3900x in multi core workloads.Phynaz - Friday, August 2, 2019 - link
Show me a laptop with a 3900x.Thought so.
Idiot.
Alistair - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
Are you dumb? Single core performance is equal, not multicore (it is 1/3 the speed).Xyler94 - Sunday, August 4, 2019 - link
Show me a laptop with an i9 9900ks which can handle the insane tdp it needs.Thought so,
Idiot
R6E7980XE - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
“For Sunny Cove this has increased, but it gets a bit more complicated. In one clock Sunny cove can perform 2x64-byte reads and either 1x64-byte write, or 1x32-byte write, or 2x16-byte writes.”@Ian Cuttress Please correct me if I’m remember wrong.
Sunny Cove Microarchitect consisted 2 x 64 Byte / cycle Load and 2 x 64 Byte / cycle Store.
according to https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/File:sunny_cove_block...
CharonPDX - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
Wow. 0.7 GHz? AKA 733 MHz? Like the Celeron I had back in 2000? (That overclocked like a *BOSS*, just crank the FSB up from 66 MHz to 100 MHz, and get 1.1 GHz.)AV_Stables - Sunday, August 4, 2019 - link
The best OC CPU Intel ever released was the Celeron 300A (had that at 598mhz) :) almost 100% OC, moved on to Pentium 3 Coppermine & Tulatin and an ES (clocked at 733) using the 920C (rambus) chipset (horror absolute) . But coming back to earth and reality this preview is just A PR exercise in customer retention. Sure the iGPU and cores are better, but come on people are you this easily won over. The Y series is more power hungry. Id rather you stick to actual released products, as many will see this as doing Intels' PR work for them as I do.voicequal - Sunday, August 4, 2019 - link
Given that the CPU is already starting to ship to OEMs, better to have hard facts and analysis from a trusted source than weeks more of rumor and speculation while we wait for an arbitrary public release date.AV_Stables - Monday, August 5, 2019 - link
Show me one in the wild and ill say fair do.guachi - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
Appreciate the preview. YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed highlighted your preview and made sure to tell viewers to come here and give you guys the views.As I'm a regular reader, I'm happy to do so.
albert89 - Saturday, August 3, 2019 - link
Is it really, really, really happening this time around ?HarryVoyager - Sunday, August 4, 2019 - link
It's probably already been asked an answered, and I've missed it in the thread or review, but how do we think these are likely to stack up against the current AMD CPUs for single thread performance? I noticed that they appear to have increased the per clock performance, but appear to have had to drop the clock rate to get that.The thing that's eating my PC's lunch is primarily VR flight simulators (Tomcat Tomcat Tomcat!), and I'm expecting the main ones are going to remain single thread performance dependent for the next 5 years or so.
Basically, if it stays in the 5%-10% range, and I'm still able to put together a machine that can do 45+ fps with a Ryzen 3000, then it make more sense to take that hit, but if we're looking at a 15-20% effective difference, then the Intel option becomes more meaningful.
I just wish the Il-2 or DCS teams would put together a good benchmarking tool...
Haawser - Sunday, August 4, 2019 - link
These are low power mobile chips, not desktop CPUs.voicequal - Sunday, August 4, 2019 - link
This Ice Lake part is targeted at mobile. If you need guaranteed single thread performance, you'd be better off with a desktop part that clocks higher and can operate at max frequency for an indefinite time without running into thermal or power budget limits.https://www.anandtech.com/show/14664/testing-intel...
This page show direct comparison with Ryzen 3900X, but it's only synthetics and doesn't normalize for frequency differences between the CPUs. That will surely come later in the full review.
Pizdatron - Monday, August 5, 2019 - link
Where are the 95W etc... variance , no info on thattamalero - Monday, August 5, 2019 - link
the 3d mark VRS test graph is very confusing.MASSAMKULABOX - Tuesday, August 6, 2019 - link
These chips are priced quite high esp the i3's the Dualcore is outrageous (20$ discount for half the cores and threads?).They will only sell in limited qtys at such high prices . Bring on the 14nm equiv at sane prices.what discrete gfx does the IGPU equate to? gt1030 vs 2200g vs 3400ge??
Zhentar - Tuesday, August 6, 2019 - link
The bit per cycle throughput of REP STOS is really only half of the picture - the startup latency matters a lot too! On my Skylake, I've measured a minimum latency of 29 cycles* (any REP STOS from 1 byte to 128 bytes takes 29 cycle, then it starts going up from there). Some compilers make heavy use of it even for small stores/copies (VC6, first and foremost, but also the .NET JIT for stack zeroing), so it can be pretty important to performance in some scenarios.*I am no Agner Fog... nor anywhere close to him, this measurement should be taken with a grain of salt ;-)
ballsystemlord - Wednesday, August 7, 2019 - link
@Ian
Sunny Cove SIMD chart and others have many asterisks, why?
"POPCNT Microcode 50% faster than SW (under L1-D size)"
What does this mean? The CPU uses microcode and HW, not SW, AFAIK, much less use it to implement the POPCNT instruction.
ballsystemlord - Thursday, August 8, 2019 - link
Spelling and grammar errors:Insert: I've been commenting corrections for at least 1 year now, if you guys want me to change the format, or have any request regarding phrasing, etc., just ask. Thanks for your work!
"L3 latencies look similar, however we'll dwell into that just in a bit."
I think you ment delve:
"L3 latencies look similar, however we'll delve into that just in a bit."
"IPC increases against the mobile Skylake are 33 and 38% in the integer and fp suites, though we also have to keep in d mind these figures go beyond just the Sunny Cove architecture and also include improvements through the new LPDDR4X memory controllers."
Missing percent sign and stray "d".
"IPC increases against the mobile Skylake are 33% and 38% in the integer and fp suites, though we also have to keep in mind these figures go beyond just the Sunny Cove architecture and also include improvements through the new LPDDR4X memory controllers."
"...which did not go down to well."
You mean "too" not "to":
"...which did not go down too well."
"...we actually see a number of key microarchitectural improvements bubble up through in our SPEC testing."
Excess "in":
"...we actually see a number of key microarchitectural improvements bubble up through our SPEC testing."
alysdexia - Thursday, November 28, 2019 - link
I think you mean Baalsystemlord or Bàqhàlsýstemlord.Grammar is a barbarism of ghrammatics, another word for composition or handwriting, font, format, spacing, the looks, whereas you meant diction/lecsis or register, vocabulary, declension, placement, spelling, the meaning.
you guys -> ye
nils_ - Monday, August 19, 2019 - link
I noticed on Intel Ark that Ice Lake CPUs do not have TSX instructions enabled / available. THis is interesting, since I believe TSX has also been used for some of the spectre attacks.ikjadoon - Thursday, September 12, 2019 - link
On 'Gaming Results (15W and 25W)', the graph is colored incorrectly. "On" and "Off" have the same color...and the legend colors are somehow not related to the graphic?