英特尔Skylake与AMD Zen正面pk，毫无悬念？

AMD新款Carrizo架构APU仍然不及英特尔的Skylake第九代SoC。英特尔第九代高清图形处理器也优于AMD的Carrizo iGPU产品。英特尔在集成图形处理方面下了很大功夫。英特尔15W eDRAM产品的引入让其中高端解决方案更有竞争力。AMD的Zen结构将有显著提升，但英特尔在接下来的几年里火力很足。

Summary

New Excavator/Carrizo APUs are still no match for Intel's Skylake/Gen9 SoCs. Intel HD Graphics Gen9 is better than Carrizo iGPU. INTC is working very hard on integrated graphics. Intel's eDRAM introduction at 15W makes its mid-end and high-end solutions more compelling than before. Zen architecture will be a certain remarkable improvement, but INTC has a lot of firepower for the following years.

With the last Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) Carrizo APU release, people thought that AMD could achieve very good results in the APU field, reducing the performance gap against Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) while achieving some graphics advantage. AMD claimed an improvement about +15% of IPC and +30% of performance per watt at 15W TDP. As for the graphics field, AMD claimed +65% performance than the last Kaveri APUs at the same TDP.

Such a boost would have set a good base start for the successive Zen architecture, which will effectively reach the market in 2017.

I must admit that I was quite skeptical about those performance claims, and first benchmarks confirm my doubts. In addition, it looks like Intel has worked very hard on integrated GPUs, and it is finally introducing the eDRAM even in those 15W SoCs, providing a huge graphics boost that AMD cannot reach even with its last architecture.

Intel Skylake Vs. AMD Carrizo

From the CPU point of view, it would have been possible to see more improvement from Steamroller to Excavator than from Broadwell to Skylake. However, the last benchmarks tell a different story: AMD A10-8700P performs roughly 10-15% better than AMD A10-7350B while Intel i5 6200U/6300U performs roughly 10-15% better than Intel i5 5200U/5300U. This simply means that Excavator architecture meets the claims, but it only provides a performance improvement (talking about %) similar to Skylake. Obviously, since Intel's solution is quite faster, Skylake provides a better absolute improvement.

(First Surface Book reviews show that Skylake could perform even better when the thermal dissipation is built correctly. Microsoft Corporation's (NASDAQ:MSFT) devices are to be well considered when talking about benchmark comparisons).

Intel vs AMD

However, this is not where I want to focus since it's always clear that Intel Skylake would have been widely faster. I want to focus on the GPU field instead, where AMD basically claims to be faster and more competitive.

We can check the following table, where I resumed performance improvements on similar/specular benchmarks for HD 5500, HD 520, R6 Kaveri, and R6 Carrizo (note that there are still few benchmarks available to make a comparison):

Graphic comparison HD 5500 HD 520 R6 Kaveri R6 Carrizo

The performance leap from Intel HD Graphics Gen8 to Gen9 is greater compared to the performance leap from Kaveri to Carrizo. This makes sense since AMD had to lower the TDP by 4W (-21%) while Intel is pushing very hard on graphics improvements.

Unfortunately, there is only one game benchmark available at the moment, it is Dota 2. This is a game that significantly favors Intel's graphics at low resolution and quality settings, a scenario where the CPU must work hard to elaborate the high GPU frame rate. On the contrary, at higher resolution a