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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Spunjji - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
Came here to leave an identical comment before I've even read the article 😂DigitalFreak - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
The Tiger King puns are getting old.huangcjz - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
I still don't get it...Luminar - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
RIP AMDtipoo - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
You haven't had the...Well I can't say pleasure, of watching Tiger King thenFlunk - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
Wow, this naming scheme is even worse than the previous one. I've been patiently explaining to people for years that the number after the I is less important than that last letter.E.G. H > U > Y
I can't even imagine how you'd explain this to someone who isn't a hardcore enthusiat. You basicallly need to look up each CPU number to know where in the stack it is. Might as well give up on the numbers entirely.
wr3zzz - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
I am with you but it sounds like the 85 in 1185G7 is the new U.ingwe - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
Agree with Ian and Andrei. The power/naming shenanigans are just miserable.Spunjji - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
Intel's product naming division is its own circle of hell.CajunArson - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
You guys really REALLY need to update NAMD to the 2.14 nightly builds to get a real idea of what Willow Cove can do in a workload that is very heavily used in HPC: https://www.hpcwire.com/2020/08/12/intel-speeds-na...