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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tipoo - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
Sounds like their next Macbook releases are going to be Apple Silicon, not sure we'll ever see a TGL Apple system.AMDSuperFan - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
What worries me the most is that this Tiger is better than Renoir in every way possible. I feel like Intel is the Apple of laptops now and our AMD are some knockoff tablet with good specs but not up to snuff. This 4 core beating the 8 core Renoir is terrible. I know we have Big Navi coming and that should save us here, but right now the Nvidia and Intel products are really bad for us fans.Spunjji - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
I worry about the mental health of the person running this account.eddman - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
Why intel didn't do 6-8 core low power models again? 10nm too power hungry? Low yields and/or low manufacturing capacity?Spunjji - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
Yes!But seriously, all of the above.
eek2121 - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
Fab capacity.RedOnlyFan - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
Hahaha. Fake informationSpunjji - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
What's your explanation then, Red? "They didn't want to"?They compete well with AMD at 15W but need 28W to get full performance from the design. Squeezing twice as many cores in would push them way, way off the bottom of their efficiency curve. They're running more complex cores than AMD and they require more power, no way around that.
If yields were good enough they'd have had 8-core Ice Lake designs out taking the fight back to AMD on the desktop, but mysteriously they skipped those and rehashed Skylake again. It's almost like something was holding them back...
JayNor - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
Intel chose to integrate high performance wifi6, thunderbolt 4, avx512, dlboost, pcie4 features rather than the more small hammers approach.Alder Lake will have even smaller and lower power cores than AMD's, so perhaps next year the choice for Cinebench processing will get funny.
RSAUser - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
You mentioned this again, so I'll comment again:WiFi 6/802.11ax: AMD does not do networking equipment, it's also not part of the CPU, it's an
extra module attached to the mobo.
PCIe 4: No benefit in laptops, there's no SSD that can really max it out consumer side and GPU wise. PCIe 4 consumes a lot more power than 3rd gen.
Thunderbolt 4: You actually mean USB 4.
AVX512: Not many things actually use this, a majority of those use-cases can just go GPU, and you're not really running an AVX512 workload on a laptop.
DLBoost: Intel's ML library, you're not training ML libraries on a laptop CPU, you'd near always want to use a GPU instead, plus that specific one is Intel's trademark one, you'd use open source alternatives.
AMDs' leaked roadmaps are USB 4 and PCIe 4 in 2022, and here you didn't mention LPDDR5, which is also included in that release.