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More Than Throughput: Next Generation Wi-Fi Testing with Ixia’s WaveDevice

It’s been quite some time since I first started writing for AnandTech, and without question there’s been a lot of changes that have happened to our testing methodologies in the past few years. One of the main issues that I’ve always been thinking about while working through reviews is how we could improve our testing methodology in a meaningful way outside of simply updating benchmarks to stay current. Internally we’ve been investigating these issues for quite some time now, and these changes have included the addition of SoC power efficiency comparisons and display power efficiency measurements. There are a lot of other changes here and there that I still want to make, but one of the major unexplored areas has been wireless radio performance.

Wireless performance testing is probably one of the hardest things that we could test, and for a time I had almost given up hope on deploying such testing within AnandTech. However life has a way of playing out differently than I expect, and in the past few months we’ve been working with Ixia to make Wi-Fi testing a reality. Ixia, for those of our readers who aren’t familiar with the company, is a traditional player in the networking test space. They are perhaps best known for their Ethernet test products, and more recently have been expanding into wireless and security testing with the acquisition of companies like VeriWave and BreakingPoint Systems.

We have done Wi-Fi testing before, but in the past we were mainly focused upon a relatively simple and arguably not particularly interesting test case: maximum throughput in ideal conditions. It was obvious that Wi-Fi in many devices is still not perfect, as subjective differences in reception and reliability can feel obvious. However, without any data or methods of replication it was hard to really prove that what we felt about wireless performance was really the case. To see how we’ve changed this, read on for the full article.

Intel Quietly Speeds Up Skylake-U: i7-6660U now in Price List
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Intel Quietly Speeds Up Skylake-U: i7-6660U now in Price List

Intel has quietly added a new Skylake-U processor into its price list. The new Intel Core i7-6660U system-on-chip is designed for low-power notebook systems and provides higher performance than its direct predecessor, the Core i7-6650U, and sits on the top of Intel’s 15W mobile CPU stack.

The new Intel Core i7-6660U belongs to the Skylake-U family of processors that feature CPU and PCH on the same piece of substrate and are used to build mobile PCs with low power consumption. The new chip is currently only listed in Intel’s price list, which reveals its general specs (two cores with hyperthreading, 4 MB L3 cache and 2.40 GHz clock-rate, no word on turbo) as well as its price of $415 in 1000-unit quantities. The CPU costs the same amount of money as the Core i7-6650U and the Core i7-6560U.

If the Core i7-6660U chip shares general design with its predecessor, then it features two cores with Hyper-Threading technology clocked at 2.40 GHz (up 200 MHz from the i7-6650U), 4 MB L3 cache, a dual-channel memory controller (support for DDR4-2133, LPDDR3-1866 and DDR3L-1600 memory), Intel Iris Graphics 540 (48 execution units with 64 MB eDRAM, up to 1.05 GHz clock rate, up to 806.4 GFLOPS compute performance) as well as a 15 W TDP. The new processor should also support all the technologies that other Skylake-generation mobile Core i7 chips support, including AES-NI, AVX 2, vPro, virtualization (VT-x, VT-d), software guard extensions (SGX), TSX-NI, MPX, Trusted Execution, Secure Key, SSE4.1/4.2 and so on.

Intel Core i7 “Skylake-U” CPU Comparison
  Core i7-6660U Core i7-6650U Core i7-6600U Core i7-6500U Core i7-6567U
Cores/Threads 2/4
Base Frequency 2.4 GHz 2.2 GHz 2.6 GHz 2.5 GHz 3.3 GHz
Turbo Frequency unknown 3.4 GHz 3.4 GHz 3.1 GHz 3.6 GHz
L2 Cache 256 KB x 2 (512 KB)
L3 Cache 4 MB
Memory Dual-channel DRAM controller with
DDR4-2133, LPDDR3-1866, DDR3L-1600 support
iGPU Iris Graphics 540 Iris Graphics 540 HD Graphics 520 HD Graphics 520 Iris Graphics 550
iGPU Config 48 EUs 24 EUs 48 EUs
eDRAM 64 MB – 64 MB
TDP 15 W 28 W
Configurable TDP-down unknown 9.5 W 7.5 W 23 W
Launch Q1 2016 Q3 2015
Price $415 $415 $393 $393 $415

The quiet addition of the Core i7-6660U into the price list indicates that Intel is starting to gradually refresh its Skylake lineup of products. It is unclear whether the refresh is conditioned by the upcoming spring refresh cycle of PC makers or higher yields of chips produced using the 14 nm process technology. Nonetheless, the new CPU will help PC makers to differentiate their new offerings and speed up performance in certain applications.

Source: Intel Price List via CPU-World.

Intel Quietly Speeds Up Skylake-U: i7-6660U now in Price List
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Intel Quietly Speeds Up Skylake-U: i7-6660U now in Price List

Intel has quietly added a new Skylake-U processor into its price list. The new Intel Core i7-6660U system-on-chip is designed for low-power notebook systems and provides higher performance than its direct predecessor, the Core i7-6650U, and sits on the top of Intel’s 15W mobile CPU stack.

The new Intel Core i7-6660U belongs to the Skylake-U family of processors that feature CPU and PCH on the same piece of substrate and are used to build mobile PCs with low power consumption. The new chip is currently only listed in Intel’s price list, which reveals its general specs (two cores with hyperthreading, 4 MB L3 cache and 2.40 GHz clock-rate, no word on turbo) as well as its price of $415 in 1000-unit quantities. The CPU costs the same amount of money as the Core i7-6650U and the Core i7-6560U.

If the Core i7-6660U chip shares general design with its predecessor, then it features two cores with Hyper-Threading technology clocked at 2.40 GHz (up 200 MHz from the i7-6650U), 4 MB L3 cache, a dual-channel memory controller (support for DDR4-2133, LPDDR3-1866 and DDR3L-1600 memory), Intel Iris Graphics 540 (48 execution units with 64 MB eDRAM, up to 1.05 GHz clock rate, up to 806.4 GFLOPS compute performance) as well as a 15 W TDP. The new processor should also support all the technologies that other Skylake-generation mobile Core i7 chips support, including AES-NI, AVX 2, vPro, virtualization (VT-x, VT-d), software guard extensions (SGX), TSX-NI, MPX, Trusted Execution, Secure Key, SSE4.1/4.2 and so on.

Intel Core i7 “Skylake-U” CPU Comparison
  Core i7-6660U Core i7-6650U Core i7-6600U Core i7-6500U Core i7-6567U
Cores/Threads 2/4
Base Frequency 2.4 GHz 2.2 GHz 2.6 GHz 2.5 GHz 3.3 GHz
Turbo Frequency unknown 3.4 GHz 3.4 GHz 3.1 GHz 3.6 GHz
L2 Cache 256 KB x 2 (512 KB)
L3 Cache 4 MB
Memory Dual-channel DRAM controller with
DDR4-2133, LPDDR3-1866, DDR3L-1600 support
iGPU Iris Graphics 540 Iris Graphics 540 HD Graphics 520 HD Graphics 520 Iris Graphics 550
iGPU Config 48 EUs 24 EUs 48 EUs
eDRAM 64 MB – 64 MB
TDP 15 W 28 W
Configurable TDP-down unknown 9.5 W 7.5 W 23 W
Launch Q1 2016 Q3 2015
Price $415 $415 $393 $393 $415

The quiet addition of the Core i7-6660U into the price list indicates that Intel is starting to gradually refresh its Skylake lineup of products. It is unclear whether the refresh is conditioned by the upcoming spring refresh cycle of PC makers or higher yields of chips produced using the 14 nm process technology. Nonetheless, the new CPU will help PC makers to differentiate their new offerings and speed up performance in certain applications.

Source: Intel Price List via CPU-World.

Best CPUs: Q1 2016
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Best CPUs: Q1 2016

When building a custom PC, especially on the consumer side, the processor is typically second or third down the list of priorities, behind graphics, storage or specific motherboard features depending on the use case. A lot of choosing a processor star…