IntelUser2000 DS426 said: Here we go again with Geekbench. Do the results include iBOT? I don't doubt that Wildcat Lake is a huge improvement over Twin Lake, but I'm not going to get excited over a single synthetic benchmark result on an engineering sample product. It's a 4.6GHz Cougar Cove core, the same one in Pantherlake. The top Pantherlake core is only at 5.1GHz, and that's for the highest 388H. So in ST it won't be much behind. usertests said: Those Alder Lake-based cheap laptops are often coming with 8 GB soldered LPDDR4-3200 and an empty DIMM slot, so another DDR4-3200 stick will about match the bandwidth of a typical Wildcat Lake LPDDR5X system, with higher capacity at a relatively low cost. Pantherlake has memory compression that makes its throughput 20-30% better than it would be otherwise. LPDDR5-7466 single channel with that is then roughly equal to DDR-4500 dual channel. Bandwidth doesn't really matter for CPU workloads, but it will for GPU. CPU-wise, it will be better than 1315U, as that's only 2+4 on older gen. Wildcatlake is 2+4, but the E's are essentially like the P cores in 1315U. But, the Xe3 in Pantherlake isn't too memory bandwidth bound. It's less than half the bandwidth, but it has 1/4th the shader count. It's weakness is going to be the absolute GPU performance due to having such a cut down config. The older Alderlake-N and Twinlake actually did decent in gaming because the CPU was much better than the predecessor, and it was DDR5 so it was faster in 3D than the predecessor by a noticeable amount. You also get the battery life advantages Alderlake and Raptorlake won't have, plus latest media standard. I wouldn't get Alder/Raptor over this just because of the battery life advantages and media alone. Reply
usertests IntelUser2000 said: The older Alderlake-N and Twinlake actually did decent in gaming because the CPU was much better than the predecessor, and it was DDR5 so it was faster in 3D than the predecessor by a noticeable amount. You also get the battery life advantages Alderlake and Raptorlake won't have, plus latest media standard. I wouldn't get Alder/Raptor over this just because of the battery life advantages and media alone. It's going to be a close call for me. I'll be heavily scrutinizing Wildcat Lake. But I did not know about the memory compression, that's interesting. One weakness of Alder Lake-N was that the cheapest models would be paired with DDR4 memory. That's impossible with Wildcat Lake, so there will be a big jump in bandwidth in every unit you can buy. The (LP)DDR5 support of Alder Lake-N was also capped at 4800 MT/s. If Wildcat ends up with up to 2-3x the GPU performance of Alder Lake-N 32 EUs, then bandwidth improvements could be helpful. Maybe the higher bandwidth is also relevant to Wildcat Lake's LPE-cores, which aren't likely to have any L3 cache access and would be hitting memory more often than E-cores. I'm not sure I care about the media engine improvement. Is it better than Lunar Lake? Compared to Alder Lake-N, you'll get VVC (H.266) decode, which could be a niche codec for years, and 12-bit AV1 decode. Also AV1 encode, which matters to some users. Reply
IntelUser2000 usertests said: It's going to be a close call for me. I'll be heavily scrutinizing Wildcat Lake. But I did not know about the memory compression, that's interesting. One weakness of Alder Lake-N was that the cheapest models would be paired with DDR4 memory. That's impossible with Wildcat Lake, so there will be a big jump in bandwidth in every unit you can buy. The (LP)DDR5 support of Alder Lake-N was also capped at 4800 MT/s. If Wildcat ends up with up to 2-3x the GPU performance of Alder Lake-N 32 EUs, then bandwidth improvements could be helpful. Maybe the higher bandwidth is also relevant to Wildcat Lake's LPE-cores, which aren't likely to have any L3 cache access and would be hitting memory more often than E-cores. They did per clock testing and while on Lunarlake the LPE cores were significantly slower than Arrowlake's E cores, despite the same uarch, on Pantherlake, they were only 5% slower than the regular E cores within the same chip. The LPE in Pantherlake is ~20% faster per clock than LPE in Lunar. Because Darkmont is few % faster than Skymont, it makes LPE in Pantherlake essentially equally to Arrowlake's Skymont, or roughly in line with Raptorlake P cores. Whatever they did with the memory controller(improved both bandwidth and latency), and I suspect even the dog-slow memory side cache on Lunarlake was improved on Pantherlake. The memory side cache on Lunar was useless in terms of performance, it was only little bit faster than system memory. Single thread CPU improvements are mostly latency bound, meaning Pantherlake improves there substantially. GPU improvements are harder to guess. But the 4 Xe core version is 3-5x the performance of the one in N305. So it depends on how it scales, but graphics-wise half the cores and half the bandwidth is at the worst half the performance. If anything, I don't believe the 4 Xe core version is needs the 7466 memory at all, and Wildcatlake might do better than 1/2. usertests said: I'm not sure I care about the media engine improvement. Is it better than Lunar Lake? Compared to Alder Lake-N, you'll get VVC (H.266) decode, which could be a niche codec for years, and 12-bit AV1 decode. Also AV1 encode, which matters to some users. I don't know much about those codecs, but back when Intel introduced VP9 hardware support on Broadwell, they talked about significant CPU usage reductions(thus power reduction) on video playback. Later that came to be important as it became used for Youtube. I tested bunch of Haswell laptops and it takes 3-3.5W on a U-class CPU to do playback on Youtube. A Y-class Kabylake one I tested does it at 1.5-2W. While a little may have to do with U vs Y, the testing across multiple laptops were roughly consistent with reviews, meaning the successful improved support had to do with the reduction. Reply
usertests By the way, there was a rumor that we'll eventually get Wildcat Lake Refresh with 4P + 4LPE, with no changes to GPU, NPU, or PCIe. I assume this reuses the Wildcat Lake I/O tile, while bringing in the smallest Panther Lake CPU tile. For all I know they could be using that tile in Wildcat Lake already but disabling 2+ P-cores and some cache. I have no idea, and Intel is not rushing to talk about Wildcat. Reply
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