#Diskmark futuremark plus
#Diskmark futuremark series

While still much faster than a SATA SSD, the PM971 is limited to a PCIe 3.0 x2 link, which is going to impact the maximum read and write speeds.Īs you can see in the CrystalDiskMark test, the maximum read speed is well under something like a Samsung SM961. There is likely only one downside to the PM971 BGA SSD, and that is performance. The drive is also most likely more energy efficient than the fastest SSDs available today, which should help with battery life. The BGA SSD is significantly smaller than any M.2 SSD, especially the 2280 versions that are the most common. The benefits of going this route are mostly packaging. Microsoft has gone a different route with the new Surface Pro, by moving to a much smaller BGA SSD in the Samsung PM971. PCIe SSDs have been the name of the game for the last couple of generations of Ultrabooks, but they’ve generally been shipping in the M.2 form factor. The extra EUs available would also be of benefit to any productivity app that can leverage the GPU for some of its compute. For light gaming, it should work well, but the extra eDRAM can help out on practically any task. It’s not quite up to par with even a low-end discrete GPU, but compared to the other integrated GPUs available in the other Ultrabooks, the Iris really brings the performance up a step.

#Diskmark futuremark series

It’s great to finally be able to test a system with a U Series CPU and Iris graphics, and the results are quite impressive. The Iris does allow a lot more graphics potential, but for longer duration requirements, it may not offer much of an upgrade. Compared to the Microsoft Surface Book, with it’s discrete GT 940M GPU, there’s really no contest, since that GPU alone would have 20-30 Watts of TDP available to it.

At lower settings, they are very capable, and the extra CPU speed from the i7-7660U helps break the CPU bound barrier of the other systems, but once the graphics are turned up, the U series chip runs into the thermal barrier of only having a 15-Watt TDP.

#Diskmark futuremark plus

Here the Iris Plus Graphics do not bring the kind of improvement that would have been hoped for. Valve’s Dota 2 online area game continues to be our go-to game for testing systems with lower end graphics, since it has a low barrier of entry, and is quite playable at low settings even on a system with integrated graphics. The Intel Iris graphics pull out a hefty lead here. Since we don’t have any comparison data, for now we’ll stick with the older tests while we fill out the data gaps. GFXBenchĪnother synthetic, Kishonti’s GFXBench also continues to evolve, with new tests being added to provide more stressful tests than the older T-Rex and Manhattan ones. Compared to the non-Iris Ultrabooks though, the i7-7660U delivers a lot more performance.

The GT 940M in the Surface Book still manages to hold an edge on the more graphically demanding tests, but is then surpassed as the workload gets easier, and the test becomes more CPU bound. Each of the tests move from quality to performance, with Fire Strike being the most demanding, and Ice Storm Unlimited being a smartphone or tablet test. 3DMarkįuturemark’s 3DMark continues to be developed, and new tests have been added for higher end systems, but for our purposes on this review, the normal results will do just fine. In the graphs below, make note that the Dell XPS 15 has a GTX 960M graphics card, which should win pretty handily, but the Surface Book has a smaller GT 940M with 2 GB of GDDR5, so it will be interesting to see the performance difference between the integrated Iris Plus Graphics 640, and a discrete entry-level GPU.

The addition of 64 MB of eDRAM is also a large benefit to graphics, which needs a lot more memory bandwidth than the CPU, and having this extra eDRAM as a cache for the GPU is a big benefit to the Iris Plus graphics. The base frequency for the graphics is 300 MHz, with a 1.1 GHz boost frequency. Despite having the same TDP, having twice as many EUs running should still be a big boost to performance, as even if they need to throttle, there are twice as many, so they can run slow and wide and still fit in the TDP. On a typical U series Intel Core processor, there are 24 execution units (EUs) available, but the Iris Plus doubles that to 48.

With the Core i7-7660U, we finally get a chance to look at the Intel Iris Plus Graphics 640 in a notebook.