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.
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Spunjji - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
Yet actual performance isn't as far apart as IPC alone would indicate, because the designs differ in some fundamental ways. It'll be interesting to see how this shakes out in practice.RedOnlyFan - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
Lol you have got your info wrong. Sunny cove and willow cove IPC is more or less the same. Sunny cove is 18% higher IPC over skylake. Willow cove performance is higher because of higher clock ~20% more. It's impossible to define what's "sufficient".Rudde - Saturday, September 19, 2020 - link
From Spec2017: Willow Cove has 15% higher integer IPC and 12% higher floating point IPC compared to Zen 2. Zen 3 should be on par with Willow Cove on IPC. Golden Cove will of course keep a gap to Zen 3.zepi - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
You should also publish the frequency vs. time graph for some of the tests. This would make it much easier to estimate how the chips scale with TDP.Sychonut - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
For me personally, the real star of the show are those ARM processors (especially Apple's) performing so admirably at a smaller power envelope.abufrejoval - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
For me the biggest motivator for getting one of these in a NUC would be to play with the shadow stack, control flow integrity (CFI) and memory encryption, because the ability to run secured corporate VMs on personal home-office hardware has a lot of appeal, even if it's originally a cloud issue.I'd obviously want those same features from AMD and wonder where they stand: Are their VM encryption mechanisms sufficiently similar to what Intel is pushing (would such things actually be covered under their intellectual property agreements)?
Any word on CFI from AMD? Or actual implementation of similar extensions on the ARM side?
vinay001 - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
@Anandtech, What happened to 3080 review??Rudde - Saturday, September 19, 2020 - link
CA wildfiresandracass - Saturday, September 19, 2020 - link
The side ports on that reference model and the way the screen props the laptop up when you open it makes the device VERY reminiscent of the MSI Prestige.Like, identical.
Ian Cutress - Sunday, September 20, 2020 - link
It is. Intel initially asked the press not to put too much emphasis on the OEM they partnered with, as retail units will be different and more optimized. But a lot of press straight up mentioned it in their reviews, so I guess the cat is out of the bag.