Intel's Core M Performance Is Erratic Between Devices

An anonymous reader writes: AnandTech noticed some odd performance disparities with Intel's Core M CPU, a chip designed to bring high-powered processing to thin, fan-less devices. After investigating, they found that how OEMs build their laptops and tablets has a far greater effect on Core M performance than it does for other chips. "When an OEM designs a device for Core M, or any SoC for that matter, they have to consider construction and industrial design as well as overriding performance. ... This, broadly speaking, gives the OEM control over several components that are out of the hands of the processor designers. Screen size, thickness, industrial design, and skin temperature all have their limits, and adjusting those knobs opens the door to slower or faster Core M units, depending on what the company decides to target.

In the Core M units that we have tested at AnandTech so far this year, we have seen a variety of implementations with and without fans and in a variety of form factors. But the critical point of all of this comes down to how the OEM defines the SoC/skin temperature limitations of the device, and this ends up being why the low-end Core M-5Y10 can beat the high-end Core M-5Y71, and is a poignant part of our tests. Simply put, if the system with 5Y10 has a higher SoC/skin temperature, it can stay in its turbo mode for longer and can end up outperforming a 5Y71, leading to some of the unusual results we've seen so far."

Comments

Re:Time to stop considering individual components.

[gstoddart]

I am one of those users who thinks having to open and close an application every time I need it is idiotic.

At power up, everything stays open for days or weeks.

Do you want to know the best way possible to make your machine fast and long lived so that your disk performance isn't your bottleneck?

Put a crap ton of memory on the damned thing. Buy an older CPU, but stog it full of as much memory as you can afford, to the point that it seems like a ridiculous amount of memory.

Far too many machines suffer from having useless amounts of memory, which causes the machine to be slow to load, causes lots of paging, makes launching a new app slow as hell.

My old personal desktop was a quad core with 8 GB of RAM. My new personal desktop is an 8 core with 16GB of RAM. The intent is in 5 years I still won't have resource issues.

My wife's several year old laptop at work used to have 4GB of RAM. It was a slow and pathetic dog of a machine, because you use 4GB of RAM by the time you boot and launch Outlook. Running a VM was painful, and keeping a few apps open made the damned thing horrible.

I suggested she nag her boss for more memory. She managed to add 8GB to her existing 4GB and suddenly a machine with 12GB of RAM booted faster, was more responsive, didn't keel over when you launched a new application. Several of her co-workers found this out, asked for more RAM, and suddenly found themselves with blazing fast laptops, even though they were 3 years old.

Because the machine wasn't spending all of its time paging.

You should do some testing ... because I'd be willing to bet the average user is going to see FAR more improvements from more RAM than faster SSD. Don't make paging faster, eliminate it.

The vast majority of users are NOT CPU bound, and never will be. They're IO bound, usually from paging and swapping. Give it boatloads of RAM, and watch how much faster the machine is, and how much longer you can keep it without needing to upgrade.

A faster SSD is masking the real problem .. that you r machine is swapping like mad because it doesn't have nearly enough RAM. For some reason I never understand, people think pairing a fast machine with insufficient RAM will make for a usable machine.

A slower CPU with way more memory is actually in the real world a much faster machine. And the recommended amount of memory for a Windows machine has always been pathetically low.

I've been buying older CPUs (I'm not a gamer so I'm not CPU bound) and pairing it with gobs of memory for years, and have been recommending the same to others. My experience tells me it makes for a far more useful machine, because it's not stuck paging constantly, so it's not being slowed by disk speeds.