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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AMDSuperFan - Monday, September 21, 2020 - link
What really concerns me is this Intel Tiger is built on a 10mm process that looks like it is as good or better than the TSMC 7nm process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process. They do not talk about the +++ superfin variants for node density. We need Super Navi to fight against this. We know for laptops or gaming, nobody can touch big navi. Nvidia cannot. It will be much faster I think than 3090 or even 4090 by everything I see. Nvidia might be out of their league finally and put into their place. I would not be surprised to see Big Navi designs at 150w with 10x the speed.Rtx dude - Monday, September 28, 2020 - link
3090 is twice the size of 3080. So, it will ebd big NAVI in performance and bebchmarksShowtime - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
Sorry, but with your name alone, we can't take anything you say seriously.MrVibrato - Saturday, September 19, 2020 - link
Oh, but there are quite a few who couldn't resist the bait. Which, and this is one of my guilty pleasures, makes for entertaining reading...hecksagon - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
He's referencing the performance improvement we will see in AMD's integrated graphics once the architectural improvements from Big Navi trickle down.dotjaz - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
In the meantime, Intel wins for the next 8 months or so. We don't even know if Van Gogh can beat TGL yet.Spunjji - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
That's a charitable interpretation, but actually this account is just a sockpuppet for an Intel shill who got tired of waiting for AMD fanboys to show up and so made one of their own. Everything they post is nonsensical junk.AMDSuperFan - Monday, September 21, 2020 - link
Even as a superfan it seems obvious that our amd cannot fight against this new technology. How is a usurper faster than us on video for gaming? As the owner of ATI, we are a video gaming company. Nvidia with their Voodoo 2 technology has nothing on ATI. My 7900 card is still fast for many games even today - but the same cannot be said for Voodoo 2 cards. But we have big things on the future and we should get back our championship in 2022.PixyMisa - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
This was almost funny once.SarahKerrigan - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
Big Navi is a multi-hundred-watt dGPU. This is a laptop processor. They don't compete with each other at all.