Intel® Whiskey Lake

Category : News by T-Pole | 27 August 2019

Whiskey Lake is the code name of Intel® for the third step of optimization at 14 nm of the Skylake architecture, after Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake.

In the world of embedded architecture (long-term, therefore industrial), Whiskey Lake represents a turning point for the innovations it introduces.

Compared to previous architectures, the offer consists only of low-consumption SoCs, equipped with a nominal TDP of 15W.

Moreover, for the first time, the limit of the 2 physical cores on the U Series Embedded SoCs is exceeded, reaching 4 cores.

The SoC Embedded Whiskey Lake with 4 physical cores are:

Intel® Core™ i5-8365UE
Intel® Core™ i7-8665UE

The doubling of the number of available cores also entails the doubling of the L3 cache that passes from:

3MB a 6MB for i5
4MB a 8MB for i7

All portends a real revolution in terms of performance.

Also, again on this architecture, Intel® introduced the Turbo Boost Max 3.0 technology, which allows higher clocks than Intel® Turbo Boost 2.0.

All portends a real revolution in terms of performance.

Also, again on this architecture, Intel® introduced the Turbo Boost Max 3.0 technology, which allows higher clocks than Intel® Turbo Boost 2.0.

Kaby Lake U vs Whiskey Lake

As the benchmark data* of the Whiskey Lake Embedded SoC is not yet available, we consider the non-embedded correspondents:

Intel® Core™ i5-8365U
Intel® Core™ i7-8665U

absolutely comparable in terms of performance, which we will compare with the data relating to the Intel® Core ™ i7-7600U processor, the most powerful of the Kaby Lake U family.

Whiskey Lake Intel® Core™ i5-8365U

Whiskey Lake Intel® Core™ i7-8665U

Kaby Lake Intel® Core™ i7-7600U

The data that appear from the comparison are very interesting: the Whiskey Lake architecture allows an increase in performance up to:

+ 77% with Multi Thread loads
+ 22% with Single Thread loads

keeping the TDP unchanged

Also very interesting is the comparison between the Intel® Core ™ i7-7700T (Kaby Lake Desktop) 35W CPU compared to the Intel® Core ™ i7-8665U (Whiskey Lake) at 15W.

Kaby Lake Intel® Core™ i7-7700T

As it emerges from the data, the performances are very similar, with a considerable reduction of the TDP.

– 2,78% – Performance with Multi Thread loads
+ 18% – Performance with Single Thread loads
+ 127% – Performance per Watt

* The benchmark data is obtained with the software PassMark