Gadgetory

hey guys is Austin this little box might not look like much but inside is one of these strangest stories in Intel's history so this is the Intel nook 8 I three cym Intel have been selling these little nuts for quite a while and some of them pretty cool last year we took a look at this skull canyon nook which had a proper amount of gaining power and a tiny package with a lowly core i3 inside this does not look nearly as impressive and that's because it's not at least on paper so traditionally intel has used what is known as the tick tock model not to be confused with tick tock the tick tock so essentially there are two different ways of building a new chip first of all you just start with the big stuff the architectures the things will actually legitimately make it faster year-on-year once you do that the next iteration we just take that design and shrink it to a smaller process node so if we get a little bit of Michael's toys action let me show what happened just a couple years ago not is that really bad Square even though I have a ruler anyway so say that this is a previous generation this would be 14 a mere which is pretty much what all single Intel processors use today this strategy works great until they hit the ten nanometer node now this is what the Canon like chip inside is based on and unfortunately well they have some road bumps so the evasion going to a smaller process note is that you can cram more more transistors into a smaller and smaller area so if we have a quad-core processor and this is very simplified what you're getting here is basically the same number of cores but just in a smaller area which means that not only is the chip either cheaper to produce or you can actually fit more cores so in theory if you had a 10 nanometer chip which is the same size as the old one it could be a 6 core design as opposed to a quad-core one so when I say 40 nanometer and 10 nanometer what I'm referring to is the process technology used to actually build these chips so think of it like this if I'm trying to draw something really precise it's the difference between using like a sharpie and a pen it is a much finer grained tool which it could be much more precise with the small of the tip to be more precise and the more stuff you can cram to these tiny tiny little lines this is absolutely key to the reason why computers have advanced so much over the last 50 years every time you get a smaller and smaller process node it means you can more densely pack it with transistors which can be spent on things like the CPU the GPU really this is absolutely the reason why things are a hundred million times faster than they were in 1972 now the downside here is that these smaller and smaller you get the more difficult it is to actually pack all these transistors I mean seriously at a certain point you hit the atomic level where there's things don't really get much smaller from 2006 to 2014 every two years until we're able to shrink the process over and over and over again that is until 2014 where they hit a huge huge wall now this force Intel to get very creative with their updates without the advantage of being able to constantly change their process instead they did things like add more CPU cores to pretty much their entire lineup which brings us to the cannon Lake CPU inside this nook now originally it was supposed to ship as a seventh generation part all the way back in 2016 as you might imagine things didn't quite go that smoothly so why should anyone care about this little knock because inside this is running Intel's ten nanometers can and like processor and up until this point is the very first and only device that's shipped with it so to compare I have well maybe not a perfect apples to apples comparison however this is an aspire a five it does have a very similar with respect to core i3 just a 14 nanometer version as opposed to the 10 nanometer inside the nook put these two side-by-side and they're about as close as it gets they're both dual-core processors they both have hyper threading they both have a two point two gigahertz base really the only difference is the laptop has a slightly higher turbo and three point four versus three point two besides that it's gonna be about well this is about as close as I can get a comparison so first of all let's start out with key bench no I'm not expecting any huge performance differences but what's interesting about this is that the Kenlake chip inside is pretty much entirely undocumented now yes on the ark Intel site you can see that it does confirm at least this 10 nanometer but besides that this is an entirely new CPU architecture which has basically never been talked about before it's unusual because usually when until brings out a new series of chips they're way more on top of talking about the different specs and everything that they've done to improve it but with this it's like it was a weird half-step then they're never actually really fully acknowledged okay so very very close the Nook is very slightly quicker in single-core and a little bit quicker in multi-core but honestly that's close enough that I would consider it to be basically a draw next let's give sentiment a try in any case it definitely does not look like Kenlake is any kind of major improvement as far as IPC goes it's very very close so in this one the laptop wins by a little bit 353 versus 331 I'm pretty sure that's entirely just that slightly higher turbo I want to give a huge shout out to Ian from a non tech Vern le helping me research for this video but also doing a terrific write-up all about the incredible saga that was Intel's 10 nanometer process the fact that this is a product that is in my hand in 2019 is kind of incredible because for all intents and purposes Kenlake has been completely shelved at this point so where are things today well Intel has pretty much given up on the Canon Lake chips in favor of going straight to ice lake which in theory will be shipping later this year on a 10 animated process with improved architecture essentially it's a take on a talk rolled into one meanwhile we have the nook is what is arguably one of the only examples of an Intel future that we never got to experience although judging by the performance wasn't all that exciting to begin with