Intel’s Confusing Messaging: Is Comet Lake Better Than Ice Lake?

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This year at CES 2020, Intel held its usual pre-keynote workshop for select members of the press. Around 75 of us across a couple of sessions were there to hear Intel’s latest messaging and announcements from the show: a mixture of messaging and preview of the announcements to be made at the keynote. This isn’t unusual – it gives the company a chance to lay down a marker of where it thinks its strengths are, where it thinks the market is heading, and perhaps gives us a highlight into what might be coming from the product hardware perspective. The key messages on Intel’s agenda this year were Project Athena, accelerated workloads, and Tiger Lake.

We’ve covered Tiger Lake in a previous article, as it shapes up to be the successor to Ice Lake later in the year. Intel’s Project Athena is also a known quantity, being a set of specifications that Intel wants laptop device manufacturers to follow in order to create what it sees as the vision of the future of computing. The new element to the discussion is actually something I’ve been pushing for a while: accelerated computing. With Intel now putting AVX-512 in its consumer processors, along with a stronger GPU and things like the Gaussian Neural Accelerator, actually identifying what uses these accelerators is quite hard, as there is no official list. Intel took the time to give us a number of examples.

In this case, we’re seeing AI enhancements in the Adobe suite, Cyberlink, Blender, XSpit, and a few others. Eight of these are CPU/AVX-512 enhanced, six are GPU enhanced, and one is via the GNA. For a technology like AVX-512 to only have eight enhanced consumer applications several years after its first launch (Skylake-X was launched in May 2017) isn’t actually that great, but at least Intel is now telling us where we can find them, aside from specific compute benchmarks (3DMark Physics, y-cruncher).

As always with these presentations, part of the company’s aim is to showcase how they beat the competition. These are often cherry picked benchmarks that highlight the key points, however as it has been noted of late, Intel has been focused on ‘real world performance’ benchmarks, and is trying to shun what it calls ‘unrepresentative tests’, like CineBench, or synthetic tests. As part of this showcase, Intel was quick to point out that its laptop offerings provide more performance and better features than AMD’s Ryzen Mobile 3000 series.

It’s worth noting that when Intel or AMD show benchmark numbers, as a member of the press, it’s best to actually not pay too much attention here. Because these are often cherry picked numbers, first-party benchmarks by the companies aren’t the same as an independent test in a review. We take them with a pile of salt, but only if we bother to listen to them in the first place.

Now this is one slide that caused a lot of discussion after the event from social media, rather than the press. In this slide, Intel shows two comparable systems, the R7 3750H with an RTX 2060, against an i7-9750H with the same GPU at the same speed. Both CPUs are targeting the same market, and with the same discrete GPU, Intel puts itself ahead in the gaming tests.

Intel also added in the ‘best’ gaming system on the market today, at the maximum price, to this slide to offer a comparison point to show that there is currently no AMD system on the market with the ‘best’ graphics. This graph was meant to demonstrate that AMD can’t play in this high-end space, because OEMs won’t pair their CPUs with the best graphics. With these results, the press agreed that AMD doesn’t play in this space with Ryzen Mobile 3000, and the benchmark comparison was somewhat obsolete in that regard. The discussion on social media turned to whether Intel was being genuine in comparing AMD’s best with Intel’s best, despite the significant price difference in the CPU and comparing an RTX 2060 to an RTX 2080. To be honest, I agreed with Intel here – it wasn’t a graph designed to show like for like, but just how much performance is still on the table when money is no object. This graph became somewhat obsolete very quickly anyway, given that AMD announced its new Ryzen Mobile 4000 CPUs the next day.

However, this isn’t the slide I want to talk about today. There were a pair of slides that Intel showed that had me rather confused and surprised that I don’t think anyone else picked up on.

For the 15W processors, for thin and light laptops, Intel showed two sets of data. I’ll give the raw graphs here.
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