GoKawiilIntel has something interesting going on with its new Binary Optimization Tool. Otherwise known as iBOT, it’s a translation layer along the lines of Microsoft Prism or Apple Rosetta. However, instead of translating instructions from one ISA (instruction set architecture) to another, it’s optimizing x86 applications to run more efficiently on Intel CPUs. As Intel puts it, it translates “other x86” to “Intel x86.”
It’s one of the marquee features on Intel’s new Core Ultra 200S Plus chips, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus . Although both show performance improvements strictly through silicon, at least part of their gaming boost comes courtesy of iBOT. It’s only enabled in 12 games right now, but Intel says iBOT is part of its long-term roadmap and that it’ll be a feature in Intel chips on desktop and mobile going forward. I wanted to see just how much of a boost iBOT represented, so I tested the feature in 10 of the 12 games it’s currently supported in, and I sat down with Intel’s Robert Hallock to better understand how the feature works and what it can offer.
Strictly looking at performance, iBOT represents about an 8% boost in average frame rates across both the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus. That’s a boost we’ve seen before with Intel’s Application Optimization, or APO, in the past. The difference here is that the leads are much more consistent, and they peak as high as 18% in Shadow of the Tomb Raider with the 270K Plus.
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Data is only part of the story here, however. We’re dealing with a small pool of samples, after all, and the benefits of a feature like iBOT won’t be clear until we have a supported games list in the dozens, at least. The other part of the story is how iBOT works. It’s unique, unlike anything we’ve seen from Intel or AMD in the past, and it could hold promise if Intel sticks with it. It won’t universally improve CPU performance, but it’s a lever available through software that Intel can pull to effectively increase IPC.
That’s what we’re going to showcase here: both the performance of iBOT, and an overview of how it works, so it’s clear why the feature is so interesting. Hopefully, we’ll also dispel some of the misconceptions about iBOT. Intel has a history of promising performance improvements through software that have never really turned into much, so it makes sense that iBOT has been handled with skepticism up to this point.
Before getting into the details about how iBOT works and its potential applications, let’s get on with the benchmarks.
Intel Binary Optimization Tool benchmarks
We tested iBOT in 10 of the 12 games it’s currently supported in, as well as looked at it in Geekbench 6 (more on that in a bit). Intel says we should see an 8% uplift on average, and sure enough, I saw just about that big of a jump across both the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and Core Ultra 5 250K Plus when looking at a geomean of my results. Some games scale much higher, while in others, I didn’t see any difference at all.
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