Processor Benchmarks
The ThinkPad T470 had models with either a 6th or 7th generation Intel processors. Our test machine has an i5-6300U, a dual core mobile processor with hyperthreading. This is a 6th generation i5, launched in 2015. It has a TDP of 15W (can be lowered to 7.5W and increased to 25W).
There are many processor benchmarks available, so we’ve limited the tests to 4. We’ll start with Smallpt.
$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark smallpt
Smallpt is a C++ global illumination renderer written in less than 100 lines of code. Global illumination is done via unbiased Monte Carlo path tracing and there is multi-threading support via the OpenMP library.
The ThinkPad T470’s performance in this test is pretty respectable, not too dissimilar to the result for the quad core i5-4590T. We’ve seen systems with an i5-7300U processor obtaining around the same performance as the T470.
$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark compress-pbzip2
pbzip2 is a parallel implementation of the bzip2 block-sorting file compressor that uses pthreads and achieves near-linear speedup on SMP machines.
This test measures the time needed to compress a file (a .tar package of the Linux kernel source code) using BZIP2 compression.
The T470 completes this test in just under a minute, hindered by only having 2 cores, although its hyperthreading ensures that it completes the test faster than the quad-core Celeron J4115 processor.
$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark crafty
Crafty is a chess program directly derived from Cray Blitz, winner of the 1983 and 1986 World Computer Chess Championships.
This is a benchmark looking at the CPU’s performance through a chess benchmark. This benchmark only uses a single core. The T470’s i5-6300U puts in another good performance.
$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark x265
This is a simple test of the x265 encoder run on the CPU with a sample 1080p video file.
Due to time constraints, we only ran this test on four machines. This is the first test where the ThinkPad T470’s performance was a mite disappointing.
Next page: Page 3 – Memory / Graphics
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / System
Page 2 – Processor
Page 3 – Memory / Graphics
Page 4 – Disk / Specifications
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Lenovo ThinkPad T470 Ultrabook | |
|---|---|
| Part 1 | We spotlight the condition of our refurbished T470 laptop |
| Part 2 | Specifications of the T470 laptop using the inxi utility to interrogate the system |
| Part 3 | Installing the Manjaro distribution |
| Part 4 | We run a series of benchmarks on the T470 and compare to other machines |
| Part 5 | Multimedia performance including power management |