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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JayNor - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
vs Ice Lake the new TGL architecture doubles the bandwidth of the ring bus, adds pcie4, lpddr5, thunderbolt4 and a much superior GPU ... When will AMD catch up? They still need to add avx512, dlboost, integrate wifi6 and now they are further behind. Or do they just add two more cores and declare it even since they can win at cinebench?RSAUser - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
PCIe 4 will be next gen, and for current it doesn't really matter, pretty much no consumer SSD that can max it, and GPU is questionable.LPDDR5 should be 2022 with their next gen, which also includes PCIe5 by then.
AV512 doesn't matter, not something you run on a laptop, DLBoost is Intel trademarked, there are other ML libraries that AMD uses, and you're not really running ML training on a laptop CPU, you'd use the GPU.
The ring bus piece is an architecture difference, not sure why you're mentioning it? AMD's CCX design is better, Intel will be moving in that direction.
In regards to integrated WiFi 6/802.11ax, that's a separate module added to the mobo, AMD is not a communication tech company.
JayNor - Saturday, September 19, 2020 - link
Intel integrates the Wifi6 high speed digital components into the PCH chiplet in the same package with the cores on the laptop chips.They build a separate wifi6 chip that OEMs can use with the AMD chips.
JayNor - Saturday, September 19, 2020 - link
Intel's ring bus wins..."We can also see that, even in the 15W configuration, Tiger Lake's dual ring bus delivers slightly more throughput than the 4800U's Infinity Fabric, and has 30% more throughput at 28W with dynamic tuning."
https://www.tomshardware.com/features/intel-11th-g...
Rudde - Saturday, September 19, 2020 - link
You mean Intel caught up with AMD? Intel had a little over half the throughput of Renoir, when Renoir came out. Now Intel has caught up with AMD with Tiger Lake. AMD will likely pull ahead with Cezanne, continuing the back and forth.Spunjji - Saturday, September 19, 2020 - link
Wow, parity at 15W and a win at nearly twice the TDP. Such wins.Seriously, why do you need to pathologically overstate their achievements?
MetaCube - Friday, October 23, 2020 - link
"LPDDR5 should be 2022 with their next gen, which also includes PCIe5 by then." lmaoTheinsanegamerN - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
Maybe you dont care about having a better iGPU, but clearly its a selling point.huangcjz - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
I care about the integrated GPU. I only buy MacBooks, so AMD isn't a choice. I can't afford £2,400 for the 16" MacBook Pro with discrete graphics.playtech1 - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
I've got some bad news for you... chances of Apple releasing a Tiger Lake MacBook looks very very slim