OCTOBER 2019 • TECH ADVISOR 71BUYING GUIDEthrough firmware only. Whiskey Lake implements
changes in hardware against Meltdown Variant 3 and
Variant 5. But the biggest hit to performance, Spectre
Variant 2 fixes, won’t change much.
Our first test is Maxon’s Cinebench R15. It’s a
free benchmark based on Maxon’s older Cinema4D
rendering engine. The test is multi-threaded and
probably isn’t what most XPS 13 9380 users will run,
but it’s still a fair representation of what you’re likely to
see from the laptop and CPU in shorter multi-threaded
workloads. Those occasional multi-threaded tasks in
Excel or that rare multi-threaded Adobe Photoshop
filter would likely see similar performance bumps.
For comparison, I rounded up Cinebench scores
from eight Kaby Lake R, Core i7-8550U laptops of
varying sizes and shapes. As you can see, the new
Dell XPS 13 9380 has about a 20 percent multi-
threadedperformanceadvantage.Wecanattribute
someofthatto the new Dell XPS 13 9380 design’s
upgraded cooling – more cooling usually means more
performance – and some to the higher clocks that the
Whiskey Lake U chip can run at.
But Cinebench R15’s view of multi-threaded
performance probably doesn’t reflect much real-world
usage. The vast majority of software and games that
peopleuserelaya single-threadortwo– especially
ona 13inlaptop.Togeta bettergaugeofhow
GoogleChrome or Microsoft Word will respond, we
againrelyonCinebench,butmeasureperformance
ona single-thread.
Here,theperformancegapclosesbetweenthe
8th-gen Kaby Lake R laptops and the 8th-gen Whiskey