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Comment by throwaway613834 | Hacker News Reader

I remember seeing claims of 15-30% improved single-threaded performance. Does anyone know how legitimately I should take these? They sound way too good to be true...

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They have pretty freaking high turbo frequencies, up to 4-4.2ghz. I don’t think they had 15W processors going quite so high before.

Typically the claims of heavily improved single threaded performance are "up to x% faster", and the only time you see those peak performance improvements are during uncommon benchmarks.

Until full reviews come out it's hard to say how much of improvement across the board we'll see, but recently 2-3% ipc improvement on average plus whatever boost to frequency seems to be standard per release.

Maybe per watt?

That's not the impression I got, but I'm not well-versed in the marketing terminology. Is that the impression you get from here? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/intel-claims-30-perf...

I might miss something in that article, but this 15-30% performance increase when pitting a dual core against a quad core is pretty bad. I don't see the mention of single thread performance. It talks about overall benchmark performance.

I'm pretty sure they mean single-threaded, but I've seen different numbers floating around. Here I see between 11-29% depending on the model: https://videocardz.com/72112/intel-claims-i7-8700k-to-be-11-...

Okay. Well, you should wait for benchmarks. If like in the anandtech article mentioned the clock rate gets decreased, and that would be very normal when adding more cores, then a single thread performance increase is very unlikely. In the last launch Intel did not get close to those numbers, and that was without a core increase.

Also, there seems to be some confusion whether those processors now are a kaby lake refresh or the new coffee lake architecture. The videocardz article mentions Coffee Lake (and some other news articles call those processors that as well), but the anandtech article defines them as a Kaby Lake Refresh. A new architecture would make a single thread performance increase more likely.

Makes sense, yeah. Skeptical here as well.

The table in the article shows a ~5% increase in boost clocks for the high end models. Those are what matters for single-core performance, not the base clocks.

I think that would be correct for the Desktop, but in laptops the turbo clock normally(?) does not work for a sufficient long time to give it any meaning.

It does in well-designed machines, although usually not in the ultraslim ones. The ThinkPad T470 can sustain full turbo indefinitely according to notebookcheck. Lenovo's premium line (X1 Carbon/Yoga) cannot, though, as they're too thin and light for a sufficiently capable cooling system, and will throttle after a while.

Would you have a link to the page you're referring to? I'm wondering if that's also true for the T470p.

The T470 review is at https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T470-Core-i5-F... - but keep in mind that's a 15W i5. The 35W CPUs in the T470p produce a lot more heat. I'm sure notebookcheck has a review of that, too.

That claim is for Coffee Lake. Intel have recently taken the opportunity to make their line even more confusing; _these_ 8th generation CPUs are "Kaby Lake Refresh". Coffee Lake will be along later.

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