英特尔Skylake与AMD Zen正面pk，毫无悬念？

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 and quality settings, Intel's GPU generally loses some of its advantage because the CPU is not the bottleneck anymore. Therefore, it is interesting to see that the HD 520 improves much more than R6 Carrizo in a scenario which has always been in AMD's favor.

I must point out that the HD 520 (as well as HD 5500) powers a wide range of SoCs, from i3 to i7 solutions: the graphics performance difference is very narrow between these kinds of SoCs, and it is not unusual to see an i5 to perform better than an i7 due to thermal constraints. Remember that Intel 15W TDP SoCs are usually employed in Ultrabooks and 2-in-1 (Surface 4 Pro is an example) while the first AMD Carrizo benchmarks come from a bulky laptop (which generally favors thermal dissipation).

Just from this comparison, Intel has done a good job in the graphics field, and this causes my skepticism: If AMD targets the graphics field with its APUs, why would customers prefer its solutions all of a sudden? Excavator did not erode any relevant performance gap compared to Skylake while Carrizo iGPU provides a quite lower improvement than Intel Graphics Gen9.

AMD exploited an old, low-cost miniaturization technology (28nm); it has set very low price targets and it has endured continuous losses trying to achieve any relevant market share, but Intel's dominion is still intact. The same scenario is repeating itself with Excavator/Carrizo, or maybe it is even worse.

Obviously, we have to wait some time to analyze the future reviews of both the products, but first reviews put Intel even better positioned than last year: a XPS 13 with i5 6200U is roughly 100% faster than a XPS 13 with i5 5200U in Metro 2033 at low settings, a very high demanding game.

R7 Carrizo?

The first R7 Carrizo benchmarks show that this APU deeply suffers thermal throttling if the dissipation system is not good enough. Looking at what I have been able to find out (note that the linked article shows internal tests, but in real recent benchmarks, R6 Carrizo performs 10-15% lower in 3D Mark 11), R7 Carrizo should perform better than R6 Carrizo by +10-15%. Such a boost is obviously welcomed, but it would be only sufficient to reach HD 520 average performance in GFXBench and 3DMark.

Things get worse if we consider games with Broadwell/Gen9 (since there is only one comparable result for Skylake at the moment). If we take all the Notebookcheck benchmark games at playable settings for HD 5500 and R6 Carrizo, we will notice that Broadwell is roughly +15% faster than R6. This means that Broadwell will have similar performances compared to R7, implying that Skylake HD 520 will be significantly faster without any eDRAM module.

Intel's eDRAM offer at 15W

Intel employed the eDRAM module in various SoCs, starting from 28W solutions, but this year it has been introduced starting from the 15W offer. The top-end Surface 4 Pro employs an i7 6650U which is powered by a HD 540 Iris GPU, with 48 EUs and 64MB of eDRAM. Looking at first recent benchmarks, this GPU is able to outperform the HD 520 by 50% with the same TDP while it is roughly on par with the HD 6200 Iris Pro (47W SoC). To better evaluate its graphics capacity,