Kaby Lake Core i7-7500U Versus Skylake Core i7-6500U on Dell XPS 13

Media Encoding & Encryption Benchmarks

HandBrake v0.10.5 – link

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. It is popular today as it allows you to transcode multiple input video formats to h.264 output format and is highly multithreaded. We used Big Buck Bunny as our input file, which has become one of the world standards for video benchmarks. For our benchmark scenario we used a standard 2D 4K (3840×2160) 60 FPS clip in the MP4 format and used Handbrake version 0.10.5 to shrink that down to 1920×1080 to reduce the file size. This is something people often do to save space to put movies onto mobile devices. We the workload is encoded into h.264 output format using the normal preset. The file started out at 642MB in size with a total bitrate of 8476kps and ended up being 342MB in size with a total bitrate of 4515kbps with these settings.

X264 HD Encoding – link

the x264 HD Benchmark is a reproducible measure of how fast your machine can encode a short HD-quality video clip into a high quality x264 video file. Its nice because everyone running it will use the same video clip and software. The video encoder (x264.exe) reports a fairly accurate internal benchmark (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encode and it also uses multi-core processors very efficiently. All these factors make this an ideal benchmark to compare different processors and systems to each other. We are using x264 HD v5.0.1 for this test.

Media Encoding Benchmark Results Summary: Our media tests showed that the Intel Core i7-7500U Kabylake processor was 3.3% faster in our handbrake test and then in x264 HD it was 14.0% faster on the first pass and a solid 6.6% faster in the second pass. Not bad results here as this will shave minutes off transcoding entire movies.

VeraCrypt 1.19 – link

VeraCrypt is an open-source disk encryption software brought to you by IDRIX and is a fork based on the discontinued TrueCrypt 7.1a utility. The developers claim that weaknesses found in TrueCrypt have been resolved with the VeraCrypt project. This is a popular utility used by people that don’t want to use Microsoft’s built-in encyption tool for Windows 10 called Bitlocker.

Encryption Benchmark Results Summary: This AES Encryption test shows that the Intel Core i7-7500U Kabylake processor was 16.7% faster than the Intel Core i7-6500U!