Custom PC Magazine November 2019
English | 117 pages | pdf | 42.07 MB
Intel’s new laptop CPUs could lead to epic, Conroe-style performance gains on the desktop, argues Richard Swinburne
If you were building PCs in the early 2000s,you might remember Intel’s separate strategy for desktop and laptop architectures. While its Pentium 4 (Netburst) CPUs were being crushed by AMD’s Athlon 64 (K8) chips on the desktop,its laptop architecture was continuing an evolution of the Pentium III core, and being much more successful.
The latter was developed by its Israeli team in Haifa , which added novel functions such as micro-op fusion,smart caching, and dynamic frequency and voltage adjustment (branded SpeedStep),which are still being used in some form today. Intel later unceremoniously dumped Netburst,instead opting to use its laptop platform to develop its‘Core’ architecture, giving it the historic Conro e moment in 2006 that flipped the tide of desktop performance back to Intel in a single tick. In last month’s column, I lamented that Intel’s desktop road map doesn’t look bright for 2020,but its laptop plans are another story.
With the same Israeli team as before now developing its first serious 10nm CPU for mobile, dubbed Ice Lake (the architecture generation is called Sunny Cove), we’re seeing history repeat itself. The first results show that this architecture offers an impressive performance jump over Skylake.
These Ice Lake CPUs are now branded as ‘10th-generation’. The first CPUs that have just launched are Y and U-series chips, which have ultra-lowTDP ratings from 9-25W. They’re designed for new thin/portable style laptops, although Intel has also announced a 28W model announced for a newNUC.
Intel also divulged the details of this new architecture, and it’s a considerable upgrade. At the same clock frequency and using the same memoryas a Skylake system, there’s an average 18 per cent increase in the number of instructions per clock (IPC).We normally see single-digit improvements with a new CPU generation, so adding nearly 20 per cent is a huge gain. It achieves this feat thanks to a 50 per cent larger L1 instruction cache, a double-sized L2 cache, a wider out-of-order window and more features at every single stage of the inner architecture, through front-end,decode,reordering and execution.Intel has also added six new AVX-512 instructions and some AI task acceleration,although it’s not the same (powerful) AI hardware used in its newXeon CPUs. For more read Custom PC pdf magazine page 88.
The newGen-11 integrated graphics appears to be even more impressive. Here, Intel offers options with 32, 48 or 64 execution units (EU), which equates to 256, 384 and 512 shader pipelines. The GPU has its ownL3 cache,which is nowfour times larger than previous Gen- 9.5 at 3MB. Add support formuch faster (and lower-power) 3733MHz LPDDR4X memory, and Intel’s claimed doubling in performance vs Gen-9.5 graphics is quite believable. Intel claims it has ‘aggressive’ graphics driver updates planned too, although while driver updates have been more frequent recently, laptop makers have a spotted history of supporting them.
The rest of the Intel 10th-generation platform includes Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) support,providing youhave an extremely expensive router to take advantage of it,and Thunderbolt 3 support.All in all, it’s a solid foundation that has created an expectation that in 2021,when Intelupdates its desktop line to architecture parity with its laptop components,we’ll see a similarly huge uptick in performance; another Conroe moment, 15 years later.
RICHARD SWINBURNE / VIEW FROM TAIWAN – Richard has worked in tech for over a decade, as a UK journalist, on Asus’ ROG team and now as an industry analyst based in Taiwan
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