Overall, Geekbench found a 5.5% increase in both single and multithreaded performance with version 6.3 run on the MSI Prestige 16 AI+ with an Intel Core Ultra 9 386H. Those results aren't dissimilar to what we saw when testing iBOT with the 270K Plus and 250K Plus . Several of Geekbench's subtests saw no performance benefit, but some saw outsized performance increases, namely object removal at a 24.6% jump and HDR processing at a 28.5% jump. Geekbench chose to dig deeper into the HDR subtest to see what was going on.
With iBOT enabled, Geekbench saw a 14% reduction in overall instructions and a 62% drop in scalar instructions. However, it saw a 1,366% increase in vector instructions. To see which instructions were executing, Geekbench used Intel's Software Development Emulator, or SDE.
You may like Geekbench 6 warns about inconsistent benchmarking performance from new Core Ultra 200S Plus chips Intel’s Binary Optimization Tool tested and explained Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus review: Back from the brink With iBOT disabled and after 100 runs of the HDR subtest, Geekbench saw a total of 220 billion scalar instructions and 1.25 billion vector instructions. With iBOT on, that went to 84.6 billion scalar and 18.3 billion vector. By vectorizing a large number of the instructions in this subtest, iBOT is able to significantly improve performance, relying on SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) rather than a linear pipeline (single instruction, single data, or SISD) of scalar instructions.
The change in instruction mix is what's interesting here. Geekbench's conclusion is what you probably expect; it doesn't appreciate an optimization that only applies in a small list of applications. "[iBOT] undermines this by replacing that varied code with processor-tuned, fully optimized binaries, measuring peak rather than typical performance."
Geekbench's view is rather negative, and understandably so, but the peek behind the curtain here has a lot of implications for the future of iBOT. Vectorized instructions on modern CPU architectures can vastly improve performance with a relatively small hit to power consumption — just look at Zen 5's performance in an AVX-512 workload like Y-Cruncher. This investigation shows that Intel is able to do that on the backend with a shipping binary.
There are downsides here, however. Geekbench noted a 40-second startup delay in its initial testing with iBOT, which shrunk to a consistent two-second delay on subsequent passes. There was no delay with iBOT disabled. Additionally, it found no performance improvement with Geekbench 6.7. iBOT computes a checksum against the executable, which means it's trying to find out if a specific binary is optimized.
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/geekbench-investigates-up-to-30-percent-jump-with-intels-ibot-performance-gain-attributed-to-newly-vectorized-instructions#main
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