Intel Teases Ice Lake-U Integrated Graphics Performance
by Ian Cutress on May 26, 2019 11:05 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
- Intel
- graphics
- Trade Shows
- Ice Lake
- 15W
- Sunny Cove
- Computex 2019
- Gen11
Another snippet of information from Intel today relates to the company’s future mobile platform CPU. We know it’s called Ice Lake-U, that it is built on Intel’s 10nm process, that it has Sunny Cove cores, and has beefy Gen11 integrated graphics. We’re still waiting on finer details about where it’s going to be headed, but today Intel is unloading some of its integrated graphics performance data for Ice Lake-U.
It should be noted that this data is performed by Intel, and we have had no ability to verify it in any way. Intel shared this information with a number of press in order to set a level of expectations. We’ve been told that this is Intel’s first 1 TeraFLOP graphics implementation, and it performs as such. The presentation was given by Ryan Shrout, ex owner and editor-in-chief of PC Perspective, and data was performed by his team inside Intel.
Ryan first showed us a direct comparison between the Gen9 graphics found in Intel’s latest and best Whiskey Lake platform at 15W up against a 15W Ice Lake-U product. The results make for pleasant reading. In the game demo scenes that Intel showed us, we saw upwards of a 40% gain in performance in average frame rates. Percentile numbers were not shown.
When comparing to an equivalent AMD product, Intel stated that it was almost impossible to find one of AMD’s latest 15W APUs actually running at 15W in a device – they stated that every device they could find was actually running one of AMD’s higher performance modes. To make the test fair, Intel pushed one of its Ice Lake-U processors to the equivalent of a 25W TDP and did a direct comparison. This is essentially AMD’s Vega 10 vs Intel’s Gen 11.
For all the games in Intel’s test methodology, they scored anywhere from a 6% loss to a 16% gain, with the average somewhere around a 4-5% gain. The goal here is to show that Intel can focus on graphics and gaming performance in ultra-light designs, with the aim to provide a smooth 1080p experience with popular eSports titles.
Update: As our readers were quick to pick up on from Intel's full press release, Intel is using faster LPDDR4X on their Ice Lake-U system. This is something that was not disclosed directly by Intel during their pre-Computex presentation.
Intel Test Systems Spec Comparison | |||||
Ice Lake-U | Core i7-8565U (WHL-U) |
Ryzen 7 3700U (Zen+) |
|||
CPU Cores | 4 | 4 | 4 | ||
GPU | Gen 11 (<=64 EUs?) |
UHD Graphics 620 (24 EUs) |
Vega 10 (10 CUs) |
||
Memory | 8GB LPDDR4X-3733 |
16GB DDR4-2400 |
8GB DDR4-2400 |
||
Storage | Intel SSD 760P 256GB |
Intel SSD 760P 512GB |
SK Hynix BC501 256GB |
For some background context, LPDDR4X support is new to Ice Lake-U, and long overdue from Intel as a consequence of Intel's 10nm & Cannon Lake woes. It offers significant density and even greater bandwidth improvements over LPDDR3. Most 7/8/9th Gen Core U systems implemented LPDDR3 for power reasons, and OEMs have been chomping at the bit for LPDDR4(X) so that they don't have to trade off between capacity and power consumption.
That Intel used LPDDR4X in Ice Lake-U versus DDR4 in the AMD system means that Intel had a significant memory bandwidth and latency advantage – around 56%, on paper at least. This sort of differential matters most in integrated graphics performance, suggesting that this is one angle that Intel will readily leverage when it comes to comparisons between the two products.
Moving on, the last set of data comes from Intel’s implementation of Variable Rate Shading (VRS), which was recently introduced in DirectX 12. VRS is a technique that allows the game developer to change the shading resolution of an area on the screen on the fly, allowing a developer to reduce the amount of pixel shading used in order to boost performance, and ideally doing this with little-to-no impact in image quality. It is a new supported feature on Gen11, but it does require the game to support the feature as well. The feature is game specific, and the settings are tuned by the game, not the driver or GPU.
Intel showed that in an ideal synthetic test, they scored a 40% uplift with VRS enabled, and in the synthetic test comparing VRS on and off, that extra performance put it above an equivalent AMD Ryzen system. AMD’s GPU does not support this feature at this time.
Intel is also keen to promote Ice Lake as an AI CPU, due to its AVX512 implementation, and any software than can take advantage of AI can be equipped with accelerated algorithms to speed it up.
We expect to hear more about Ice Lake this week at Computex, given Intel’s keynote on Tuesday, but we also expect to see some vendors showing off their Ice Lake-U designs.
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69 Comments
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maroon1 - Sunday, May 26, 2019 - link
I have not seen any Ryzen-U laptop that use more than DDR4 2400Even most of expensive high-end laptop use something like DDR4 2666Mhz
danielfranklin - Sunday, May 26, 2019 - link
Exactly,If thats what they are shipping with, thats what you compare it against.
If Intel ship their Ice Lake with LPDDR4X then good on them!
Santoval - Sunday, May 26, 2019 - link
On top of that Intel used a single channel Ryzen APU machine, handicapping the AMD system even more. Let me make an uneducated guess about your reply.. : "They did so because dual channel ones are hard to find".Brunnis - Monday, May 27, 2019 - link
No, it was run in dual channel, as expected. It's confirmed here:https://twitter.com/i/web/status/11329606557309706...
Siats - Sunday, May 26, 2019 - link
LPDDR4x-3733 actually has a bandwidth of 29.9GB/s, bus width is 32bits in LPDDR4 and its variants. The AMD chip is the one with the bandwidth advantage.skavi - Sunday, May 26, 2019 - link
I love how everyone immediately attacked without knowing this.Santoval - Sunday, May 26, 2019 - link
"The AMD chip is the one with the bandwidth advantage.". It is most certainly not. npz below explains why.tekniknord - Sunday, May 26, 2019 - link
To be fair AMD Ryzen RavenRidge only supports DDR4-2400 in laptops and i haven't read anything indicating that the new 3700U supports higher memory speeds.2400 is the highest supported memory, i haven't seen any RR laptop that supports higher memory speeds.
My 2666MHz does only work as 2400MHz.
danielfranklin - Sunday, May 26, 2019 - link
The AMD comparison is certainly interesting and no where near as good as i would have thought.Yes AMD arent going to have a next-gen APU for almost another year giving the 7nm to desktops and Navi (A decision i dont agree with), but when you look at what is possible, it doesnt look great for Intel's architecture.
They barely beat AMD when they picked the benchmarks, are running 56% more bandwidth and are a process node ahead.
What will AMD be able to do with 7nm and LPDDR4X???
They are on a good run, they really need to get the next gen APUs out into laptops!
qlum - Sunday, May 26, 2019 - link
I seem random altering between low and medium settings.My guess is that intel cherry picked the settings and games chosen so in reality I expect ice lake to be a bit behind amd.
Still a pretty decent improvement assuming intel didn't doctor the results too much.