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
Xe-LP GPU Performance: Civilization VI
Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civilization series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer underflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but I have played every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, and it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.
Civ6 is a game that enjoys lots of CPU performance, so we can see the desktop APU out front here. The eight cores of the 4800U get ahead of the 15 W version of Tiger Lake in both of our tests, although the 28 W power mode gets an 8% lead in the CPU-limited test.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
253 Comments
View All Comments
IanCutress - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
... Did you actually read the review.DannyH246 - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
Ian - as you are fully aware its a reference unit supplied by Intel with various restrictions applied I.e no battery tests allowed.As you are also fully aware battery Performance is super important when it comes to this form factor of device.
As such this ‘review’ serves no purpose apart from to try and influence people buying laptops to hold off buying AMD and wait for ‘Intels new super chip‘. I.e the same message they have been pumping out the last 2years+. Look what we’ve got coming blah blah blah.
So as I said - wake me up when there’s actual hardware available and we can have a proper test.
PeachNCream - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
I want to see retail products as well, but we at least get an understanding of processor and graphics performance. Battery life will vary greatly from one laptop to another anyway given configurable TDP, screen resolution and size, battery capacity, and a bunch of other factors. In addition to that, the limitations in testing were disclosed at the beginning of the article so readers were advised had they any sort of reading comprehension.While there are some fair complaints to make about AT (where's the edit button?!), I don't think there is any sort of bias influencing the results of this article.
Spunjji - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
Some people just want things to complain about 🤷IanCutress - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
You're coming at it from the product point of view. We're coming at it from a semiconductor point of view. That's why we have details about the core, the cache, and raw performance on standardised metrics. Performance is one piece of the puzzle, I agree, for end products. But getting a chance to test one example of performance 6+ weeks before retail availability is something I've been pushing Intel and AMD to offer for years. Qualcomm already does with their Snapdragon reference designs. Intel and AMD are slowly getting on board.PixyMisa - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
The standout point of Tiger Lake is single-threaded performance, and that's unlikely to change much on production hardware. From that perspective this preview is great.Spunjji - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
If you can't draw some obvious conclusions about likely battery life from the power charts, then maybe this isn't the site for you?The eventual products will all have different battery lifr based on individual implementations anyway, so testing a single unit and trying to extrapolate to others really wouldn't get you very far. This is a solid preview that sets us up to at least expect better efficiency from TGL.
GeoffreyA - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
Surprised, but quite impressed with Tiger Lake. Good job, Intel.bernstein - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
a bit confused about the conclusion...looking at the tests i mostly see amd's 4880u being much faster than intel's 15W part... and for current task also a bit better efficiency wise (due to being faster). so it seems the 4800u is the better part.
Spunjji - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
Depends on your workload, basically. Same goes for GPU performance. Seems like a genuinely competitive situation for the first time in a long time!