How Intel Laptop Performance & Efficiency Evolved From Nehalem To Broadwell

With the OpenSSL workload, the average power draw for the Nehalem laptop averaged to 58 Watts with a peak of 62 Watts.

Here the Core i3 5010U laptop was delivering more than five times the performance-per-Watt of the Core i7 720QM. It will be very interesting to see how Skylake on laptops compare once I get my hands on a Skylake laptop/ultrabook for Linux testing.

For those still running Nehalem-based laptops, hopefully you found these results insightful. The Core i7 720QM in raw-performance did well in heavily multi-threaded tests still thanks to having four physical cores (plus Hyper Threading!) rather than the modern Core i7 ultrabook/laptop approach of just having a dual-core processor with Hyper Threading. However, as the performance-per-Watt metrics show, the modern Haswell and Broadwell laptops deliver much greater efficiency. The Broadwell laptops were delivering up to four to five times greater power efficiency than the Nehalem laptop from five years ago.

If you want to see how your own laptop on Linux compares, simply install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1512200-GA-LAPTOPS1416. To compare the performance-per-Watt, run PERFORMANCE_PER_WATT=1 MONITOR=sys.power phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1512202-GA-POWER661626.

If you appreciate all of the Linux hardware testing I do at Phoronix, consider joining Phoronix Premium this holiday season. If you are more concerned about desktop efficiency than laptops/ultrabooks, be sure to checkout my Comparing Today's Modern CPUs To Intel's Socket 478 Celeron & Pentium 4 NetBurst CPUs article from earlier this year.