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
CPU Performance: Office and Web
Our previous set of ‘office’ benchmarks have often been a mix of science and synthetics, so this time we wanted to keep our office section purely on real world performance.
Agisoft Photoscan 1.3.3: link
Photoscan stays in our benchmark suite from the previous benchmark scripts, but is updated to the 1.3.3 Pro version. As this benchmark has evolved, features such as Speed Shift or XFR on the latest processors come into play as it has many segments in a variable threaded workload.
The concept of Photoscan is about translating many 2D images into a 3D model - so the more detailed the images, and the more you have, the better the final 3D model in both spatial accuracy and texturing accuracy. The algorithm has four stages, with some parts of the stages being single-threaded and others multi-threaded, along with some cache/memory dependency in there as well. For some of the more variable threaded workload, features such as Speed Shift and XFR will be able to take advantage of CPU stalls or downtime, giving sizeable speedups on newer microarchitectures.
For the update to version 1.3.3, the Agisoft software now supports command line operation. Agisoft provided us with a set of new images for this version of the test, and a python script to run it. We’ve modified the script slightly by changing some quality settings for the sake of the benchmark suite length, as well as adjusting how the final timing data is recorded. The python script dumps the results file in the format of our choosing. For our test we obtain the time for each stage of the benchmark, as well as the overall time.
The final result is a table that looks like this:
As explained in the power tests, the 4800U with double the cores wins out here, and due to the vector pressure also wins on power efficiency. There’s still a sizeable uplift from Ice Lake to Tiger Lake at 15 W, although 28 W is needed to get something sizeable.
Mozilla Kraken 1.1
Kraken is a 2010 benchmark from Mozilla and does a series of JavaScript tests. These tests are a little more involved than previous tests, looking at artificial intelligence, audio manipulation, image manipulation, json parsing, and cryptographic functions. The benchmark starts with an initial download of data for the audio and imaging, and then runs through 10 times giving a timed result.
Automation involves loading the direct webpage where the test is run and putting it through. All CPUs finish the test in under a couple of minutes, so we put that as the end point and copy the page contents into the clipboard before parsing the result. Each run of the test on most CPUs takes from half-a-second to a few seconds.
Both the Tiger Lake results are very fast, not showing much difference between the power modes. Intel pushes ahead of AMD here, and ultimately a sizable jump over Ice Lake.
Google Octane 2.0
Our second test is also JavaScript based, but uses a lot more variation of newer JS techniques, such as object-oriented programming, kernel simulation, object creation/destruction, garbage collection, array manipulations, compiler latency and code execution.
Octane was developed after the discontinuation of other tests, with the goal of being more web-like than previous tests. It has been a popular benchmark, making it an obvious target for optimizations in the JavaScript engines. Ultimately it was retired in early 2017 due to this, although it is still widely used as a tool to determine general CPU performance in a number of web tasks.
Octane’s automation is a little different than the others: there is no direct website to go to in order to run the benchmark. The benchmark page is opened, but the user has to navigate to the ‘start’ button or open the console and initiate the JavaScript required to run the test. The test also does not show an obvious end-point, but luckily does try and aim for a fixed time for each processor. This is similar to some of our other tests, that loop around a fixed time before ending. Unfortunately this doesn’t work if the first loop goes beyond that fixed time, as the loop still has to finish. For Octane, we have set it to 75 seconds per run, and we loop the whole test four times.
The Tiger Lake system reaches new records in Optane. If there’s anything this system is fast at, it is web workloads.
Speedometer 2: JavaScript Frameworks
Our newest web test is Speedometer 2, which is a test over a series of JavaScript frameworks to do three simple things: built a list, enable each item in the list, and remove the list. All the frameworks implement the same visual cues, but obviously apply them from different coding angles.
Our test goes through the list of frameworks, and produces a final score indicative of ‘rpm’, one of the benchmarks internal metrics. Rather than use the main interface, we go to the admin interface through the about page and manage the results there. It involves saving the webpage when the test is complete and parsing the final result.
We repeat over the benchmark for a dozen loops, taking the average of the last five.
Again, another good win for Tiger Lake.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
253 Comments
View All Comments
blppt - Saturday, September 26, 2020 - link
Sure, the box sitting right next to my desk doesn't exist. Nor the 10 or so AMD cards I've bought over the past 20 years.1 5970
2 7970s (for CFX)
1 Sapphire 290x (BF4 edition, ridiculously loud under load)
2 XFX 290 (much better cooler than the BF4 290x) mistakenly bought when I thought it would accept a flash to 290x, got the wrong builds, for CFX)
2 290x 8gb sapphire custom edition (for CFX, much, much quieter than the 290x)
1 Vega 64 watercooled (actually turned out to be useful for a Hackintosh build)
1 5700xt stock edition
Yeah, i just made this stuff up off the top of my head. I guarantee I've had more experience with AMD videocards than the average gamer. Remember the separate CFX CAP profiles? I sure do.
So please, tell me again how I'm only a Nvidia owner.
Santoval - Sunday, September 20, 2020 - link
If the top-end Big Navi is going to be 30-40% faster than the 2080 Ti then the 3080 (and later on the 3080 Ti, which will fit between the 3080 and the 3090) will be *way* beyond it in performance, in a continuation of the status quo of the last several graphics card generations. In fact it will be even worse this generation, since Big Navi needs to be 52% faster than the 2080 Ti to even match the 3070 in FP32 performance.Sure, it might have double the memory of the 3070, but how much will that matter if it's going to be 15 - 20% slower than a supposed "lower grade" Nvidia card? In other words "30-40% faster than the 2080 Ti" is not enough to compete with Ampere.
By the way, we have no idea how well Big Navi and the rest of the RDNA2 cards will perform in ray-tracing, but I am not sure how that matters to most people. *If* the top-end Big Navi has 16 GB of RAM, it costs just as much as the 3070 and is slightly (up to 5-10%) slower than it in FP32 performance but handily outperforms it in ray-tracing performance then it might be an attractive buy. But I doubt any margins will be left for AMD if they sell a 16 GB card for $500.
If it is 15-20% slower and costs $100 more noone but those who absolutely want 16 GB of graphics RAM will buy it; and if the top-end card only has 12 GB of RAM there goes the large memory incentive as well..
Spunjji - Sunday, September 20, 2020 - link
@Santoval, why are you speaking as if the 3080's performance characteristics are not already known? We have the benchmarks in now.More importantly, why are you making the assumption that AMD need to beat Nvidia's theoretical FP32 performance when it was always obvious (and now extremely clear) that it has very little bearing on the product's actual performance in games?
The rest of your speculation is knocked out of what by that. The likelihood of an 80CU RDNA 2 card underperforming the 3070 is nil. The likelihood of it underperforming the 3080 (which performs like twice a 5700, non-XT) is also low.
Byte - Monday, September 21, 2020 - link
Nvidia probably has a good idea how it performs with access to PS5/Xbox, they know they had to be aggressive this round with clock speeds and pricing. As we can see 3080 is almost maxed, o/c headroom like that of AMD chips, and price is reasonable decent, in line with 1080 launch prices before minepocalypse.TimSyd - Saturday, September 19, 2020 - link
Ahh don't ya just love the fresh smell of TROLLevernessince - Sunday, September 20, 2020 - link
The 5700XT is RDNA1 and it's 1/3rd the size of the 2080 Ti. 1/3rd the size and only 30% less performance. Now imagine a GPU twice the size of the 5700XT, thus having twice the performance. Now add in the node shrink and new architecture.I wouldn't be surprised if the 6700XT beat the 2080 Ti, let alone AMD's bigger Navi 2 GPUs.
Cooe - Friday, December 25, 2020 - link
Hahahaha. "Only matching a 2080 Ti". How's it feel to be an idiot?tipoo - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
I'd again ask you why a laptop SoC would have an answer for a big GPU. That's not what this product is.dotjaz - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
"This Intel Tiger" doesn't need an answer for Big Navi, no laptop chip needs one at all. Big Navi is 300W+, no way it's going in a laptop.RDNA2+ will trickle down to mobile APU eventually, but we don't know if Van Gogh can beat TGL yet, I'm betting not because it's likely a 7-15W part with weaker Quadcore Zen2.
Proper RDNA2+ APU won't be out until 2022/Zen4. By then Intel will have the next gen Xe.
Santoval - Sunday, September 20, 2020 - link
Intel's next gen Xe (in Alder Lake) is going to be a minor upgrade to the original Xe. Not a redesign, just an optimization to target higher clocks. The optimization will largely (or only) happen at the node level, since it will be fabbed with second gen SuperFin (formerly 10nm+++), which is supposed to be (assuming no further 7nm delays) Intel's last 10nm node variant.How well will that work, and thus how well 2nd gen Xe will perform, will depend on how high Intel's 2nd gen SuperFin will clock. At best 150 - 200 MHz higher clocks can probably be expected.