Intel’s Tiger Lake 11th Gen Core i7-1185G7 Review and Deep Dive: Baskin’ for the Exotic
by Dr. Ian Cutress & Andrei Frumusanu on September 17, 2020 9:35 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- 10nm
- Tiger Lake
- Xe-LP
- Willow Cove
- SuperFin
- 11th Gen
- i7-1185G7
- Tiger King
Section by Andrei Frumusanu
CPU MT Performance: SPEC 2006, SPEC 2017
We’ve noted the earlier discussions of Intel’s TDP handling and how Tiger Lake has 15W and 28W operating modes, and where this comes into play the most is in multi-threaded scenarios where the platform is generally power envelope limited, having to otherwise clock down.
We’re showcasing the MT performance in SPEC for both the Tiger Lake modes, comparing it to both the 15W Ice Lake and AMD Renoir chips. As a note, the 15W Ice Lake platform had a sustained power draw of 18W which makes things not quite as apples-to-apples. Also as a reminder, the Intel systems have 4 cores and are running 8 thread instances, while the AMD system has 8 cores and is running 16 threads.
At first glance, the Tiger Lake system performs quite well versus its predecessor, but that’s mostly only in the 28W mode. At 15W, the generational boost, while it is there, isn’t that significant. This might point out that efficiency isn’t all that much better this generation.
AMD’s platform scales incredibly well in execution-bound workloads as it fully takes advantage of double the core count. In more memory-heavy workloads, the Zen2 cores here seem to be lacking sufficient resources and scale below the performance of Intel’s 4-core designs in some workloads.
In the floating-point results, it’s again a matter of TDP headroom as well as memory performance scalability. In the 15W results, the Tiger Lake chip posts rather small improvements over its Ice Lake counterpart, whilst in the 28W mode the gains are more considerable and even manages to outperform the AMD system more often than not.
In the overall scores, the verdict on Tiger Lake is dependent on how you evaluate Intel’s performance gains. At an (semi)equal-TDP level between Tiger Lake and Ice Lake, the improvements in performance are 17%. Intel does reach a larger 51% generational performance boost in its 28W configuration, but at that point we’re talking about quite different cooling solutions inside of a laptop, no longer making this a valid apples-to-apples comparison.
We haven’t had opportunity to test out higher TDP -HS model of Renoir yet, but with the 15W 4800U already mostly tied with the 28W i7-1185G7, we would expect it to notably outperform the Tiger Lake chip.
Overall, Tiger Lake seems to be offering roughly 20% better performance per watt over its predecessor, with increased performance beyond that coming at a cost of higher power consumption.
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deil - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
not rip as intel did respond already few times taking their 5% lead back against ryzen stack.Remember this chip will fight against zen3, which should be ~20% gains on AMD side.
This would be a great chip a year ago it would obliterate 3000 mobile on all fronts BUT against 4800u it seems like a strong contender, but it does not dethrone 4800u as best mobile chip, as you compare 15W with 28W here. This wins in thick bois, while AMD still is unrivaled for thin and light laptops.
FreckledTrout - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
Lets not go overboard there buddy. You have TGL in laptops beating AMD's almost 2 year old architectures since they run a little over a year behind using the prior generation architecture in the case of the GPU over 2 years old. When AMD moves to using current architectures in APU's I think things will be pretty darn close CPU side and AMD should win hands down with RDNA2.senttoschool - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
Zen3 on mobile is probably at least 9 months away. So TGL is competing against Renoir.AMDSuperFan - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
Fortunately we have Big Navi to help us out. I am looking forward to putting Intel back in their shoes with Big Navi.Showtime - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
Who is "us" lol. Please go back to back AyMD reddit. We don't condone fanboism here.San Pedro - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
I'm wondering if AMD is trying to push this forward.For now it seems like consumers can choose TGL or Renoir based on their use scenario.
AMDSuperFan - Monday, September 21, 2020 - link
Would it not be glorious for Zen 3 to come in at 5 watts with 50% performance as we can expect? 20% isn't so much but 50% would really change things.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
I wouldnt go that far. GPU wise Intel needs way more power to compete with the 15W reinor. Not to mention any laptop with sufficient thermal headroom can use thirde party software to raise TDP for ryzen 4000 mobile, gaining 15-20% performance in games.Other benchmarks go back and forth. On the surface intel might have a decent chip, but OEM implementation may not have the same performance.
Spunjji - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
You hit the nail on the head here - it's going to be *highly* dependent on how OEMs implement it. Still, good to see they finally sorted their process out - the efficiency of this is markedly improved, it's basically what I expected from Ice Lake in the first place.AnarchoPrimitiv - Saturday, September 26, 2020 - link
Maybe for literally 3 more weeks until Zen3 comes out, then it's just more embarrassment for Intel added to years of embarrassment... Being beaten by a company with less than a tenth of the resources, there's literally no excuse for it