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
Comparing 15 W TGL to 15 W ICL to 15 W Renoir
Despite the hullaballoo with the 28 W numbers on Tiger Lake, we suspect that most OEMs will still be positioning the hardware inside chassis built for the 15 W ultraportable market. This is where most of Intel’s OEMs have had success over the last decade, as the lower cooling requirements allow for a more user-friendly design. At 28 W, there is more of a cross-over into laptops that have discrete graphics options, and the main company that has succeeded in offering 28 W laptops without discrete graphics has been Apple - most Intel partners, if they want discrete graphics, end up looking at the 45 W processors with more cores.
So in that respect, our main battle should occur between the products built for 15 W. To that end we have been able to put the three together that will command this holiday season’s offerings: Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, and AMD’s Renoir.
- For our Ice Lake system, we have the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3. This has the top-of-the-line quad-core Core i7-1065G7, along with 16 GB of LPDDR4X-3733. Base 1.3 GHz, Turbo 3.9 GHz. Because this is an OEM design, Microsoft have determined the PL1 and PL2 values, and so they might be different from a ‘base’ design, however this is data from a real system.
- The Tiger Lake system is our Reference Design from Intel, running the quad-core Core i7-1185G7 at 15 W TDP mode. It has 16 GB of LPDDR4X-4266. Base 1.8 GHz, Turbo 4.8 GHz.
- Our AMD Renoir system is one of the most premium examples of AMD’s Ryzen Mobile in a 15W form factor, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 with the eight-core Ryzen 7 4800U processor. Even when set to the highest performance mode, the system still operates with a 15 W sustained power draw. It comes equipped with 16 GB of LPDDR4X-4266. Base 1.8 GHz, Turbo 4.2 GHz.
Compute Workload
For our 15 W comparisons, we can look again at the same benchmarks as the previous page. First up is y-Cruncher, an AVX2/AVX512 compute workload that tasks the CPU and the memory by calculating 2.5 billion digits of Pi, and requires ~11 GB of DRAM.
As we saw on the previous page, our Tiger Lake system in green at 15 W turbos up to ~53 watts before very quickly coming down to 15 W for the rest of the test.
The Microsoft Surface Laptop 3, by virtue of an OEM system, has different behavior - it turbos for longer, settles into a short turbo limit of 25 W, and then after about two minutes comes down to 20 W. The system then appears to opportunistically up the power draw until the end of the test, likely due to detecting extra thermal headroom.
The AMD Renoir processor does not turbo as high, peaking at only 38.9 W. Over the course of the next 100 seconds or slow, we see a small ramp down to just under 30 watts, before a more consistent decline over 30 seconds to 15 W, before staying at 15 W for the full test. The Renoir here has eight cores rather that four, but is running AVX2 rather than AVX-512 code.
The results are as follows:
- Ice Lake: 233 seconds, for 6072 joules, averaging 26.1 W
- Tiger Lake: 241 seconds for 4082 joules, averaging 17.0 W
- Renoir: 234 seconds for 5386 joules, averaging 23.0 W
All three systems perform the test in roughly the same amount of time, however the Tiger Lake system is very much ahead for efficiency. Tiger Lake effectively shaves off a third of the power from the previous generation Ice Lake system. We weren’t expecting this much of a jump from Ice Lake to Tiger Lake, but it would appear that Intel has done some work on the AVX-512 unit, and is putting that new high-performance transistor to use.
Professional ISV Workload
Moving onto the Agisoft test - as mentioned on the previous page, this is a 2D image to 3D modeling workflow where the algorithm comes in four stages, some of which prefer full multi-thread throughput, while others are more frequency and memory sensitive.
First, the Renoir finishes in almost half the time, mostly due to the fact that it has double the number of cores - there is no AVX-512 codepath in this test, and so all the processors rely on a mix of SSE, AVX, and perhaps some AVX2. That aside, the turbo behavior of Renoir is very interesting - we get almost 10 minutes of higher-than-base performance before the algorithm sets into a routine, hovering around 22 W. Because this test doesn’t attack the vector units as hard as the previous test, it may be a case that the Renoir system can manage the power distribution a bit better between the eight cores, allowing for the higher turbo.
Between the Ice Lake and the Tiger Lake, from the graph it would appear to be a double win for Tiger Lake, finishing in a shorter time but also consuming less power. The results are:
- 15 W Renoir: 2842 seconds for 62660 joules
- 15 W Ice Lake: 4733 seconds for 82344 joules
- 15 W Tiger Lake: 4311 seconds for 64854 joules
In this case, it’s a win for Renoir - a lot shorter time, and better power to boot, derived from the eight cores built on TSMC 7nm. Tiger Lake still represents a good jump over Ice Lake, offering 10% better performance at only 79% of the power, or a 13% increase in performance efficiency.
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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.