Intel Nehalem vs. Ice Lake Benchmarks - Including Clock + Power + Thermal Metrics

For the last of today's testing is a look at the performance-per-MHz based upon the average peak CPU frequency achieved during each test. Every second the peak CPU frequency was recorded as the highest frequency across any of the four cores for each processor.

In the case of PHPBench, the Ice Lake CPU had an average peak clock frequency of 3.2GHz and at the highest point was 3.89GHz while the older 45nm laptop chip had a 2.5GHz average peak clock frequency and 2.7GHz peak. For this test it meant the performance-per-clock was roughly 2.2x on Ice Lake that of Clarksfield.

In the single-threaded SciMark2 benchmark, the Ice Lake CPU had an average peak frequency of 3.5GHz and maxed out at 3.9GHz compared to 2.7GHz on the i7-720QM.

Under Coremark, the average peak frequency on Ice Lake was 2.48GHz for this multi-threaded benchmark while 1.79GHz for the 720QM.

Under the multi-threaded Stockfish chess benchmark the Ice Lake CPU had an average peak frequency of 2.19GHz to the i7-720QM at 1.58GHz.

Ice Lake's higher clock frequencies compared to the mobile Nehalem 45nm processor are obviously only part of its advantage with also having AVX and numerous other architectural improvements over the past decade.

Nevertheless, it was an interesting journey to quantify the difference from Nehalem/Clarksfield to Ice Lake.

Those wanting to look at more of the clock data can do so via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.

That wraps up this interesting historical comparison showing how the Core i7 laptop CPU performance compares over the past decade. For those that enjoy the daily Linux hardware benchmarking at Phoronix, consider joining Phoronix Premium, which this week is going for a holiday special. I am still exploring more compiler performance behavior and other areas of Ice Lake open-source/Linux performance from this Core i7 1065G7 for additional articles coming out.