Intel 11th Generation Core Tiger Lake-H Performance Review: Fast and Power Hungry
by Brett Howse & Andrei Frumusanu on May 17, 2021 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- 10nm
- Willow Cove
- SuperFin
- 11th Gen
- Tiger Lake-H
CPU Tests: Legacy and Web
In order to gather data to compare with older benchmarks, we are still keeping a number of tests under our ‘legacy’ section. This includes all the former major versions of CineBench (R15, R11.5, R10) as well as x264 HD 3.0 and the first very naïve version of 3DPM v2.1. We won’t be transferring the data over from the old testing into Bench, otherwise it would be populated with 200 CPUs with only one data point, so it will fill up as we test more CPUs like the others.
The other section here is our web tests.
Web Tests: Kraken, Octane, and Speedometer
Benchmarking using web tools is always a bit difficult. Browsers change almost daily, and the way the web is used changes even quicker. While there is some scope for advanced computational based benchmarks, most users care about responsiveness, which requires a strong back-end to work quickly to provide on the front-end. The benchmarks we chose for our web tests are essentially industry standards – at least once upon a time.
It should be noted that for each test, the browser is closed and re-opened a new with a fresh cache. We use a fixed Chromium version for our tests with the update capabilities removed to ensure consistency.
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.
We loop through the 10-run test four times (so that’s a total of 40 runs), and average the four end-results. The result is given as time to complete the test, and we’re reaching a slow asymptotic limit with regards the highest IPC processors.
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.
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.
We repeat over the benchmark for a dozen loops, taking the average of the last five.
Legacy Tests
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Bagheera - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
Intel isn't gonna have enough EUV in time to ramp 7nm by 2023. they are in serious trouble and floating on borrowed time, most analysts just aren't aware.https://semiwiki.com/forum/index.php?threads/will-...
Intel's 10nm is indeed competitive with TSMC 7nm in terms of density, but AMD will be moving to 5nm with Zen 4 next year, what can Intel's response be? They can increase outsourcing to TSMC but that means less utilization of their own fabs which is bad. They absolutely won't be able to get 7nm ready in time to compete with AMD on TSMC 5nm. It will be back to the status quo of Intel lagging behind AMD by one full node, and likely foregoing power efficiency for performance parity.
Bagheera - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
no actual semiconductor professional expected Intel 10nm to surpass TSMC 7nm in any tangible way. the only people who expected otherwise are uniformed enthusiasts (usually gamers, who the to be partial to Intel)The gap will only widen from here. Intel really shot itself in the foot with bad EUV planning.
https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-services/ic-kno...
watzupken - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
I feel this review concludes that Intel have effectively lost their competitive edge when their fab started to lag behind. In fact, its also conclusive that the SuperFin is really nothing super at all even when compared to TSMC's 7nm. Its just 10nm on steroids just like what they have been doing to their 14nm. From an architect standpoint, Willow Cove is decent, but the bulk of the performance is due to pushing for very high clock speed at the expense of very high power consumption. If this was released on a desktop, it will be a hit. But on mobile, I don't think one can easily find a laptop that have the cooling capability to tame the heat output and also maintain a decent battery life. Especially this processor will likely be paired with a high end GPU. To me, this is a worrying trend for Intel because they will likely have to stick around with 10nm for another couple of years at least. If their new CPU architect is unable to provide decent IPC gains without bursting the power limit, they will surely be in trouble, especially when AMD's 5nm chips may appear in the market first.mode_13h - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
> If this was released on a desktop, it will be a hit.Yes.
> I don't think one can easily find a laptop that have the cooling capability
> to tame the heat output and also maintain a decent battery life.
At 35 W, it would probably make a fine laptop. Unfortunately, competitive pressure is pushing Intel to juice their CPUs more than they really should.
sandeep_r_89 - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
Can you please please stop using the word BIOS for modern devices? Pretty much all devices have been on UEFI only for several years now.Silver5urfer - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
Ah the M1 fastest CPU ever, doesn't make it to SMT SPEC scores for some reason, like always. Don't worry we will see the Apple CPU which would be X version of the chip iteration when it finally catches up to the SMT of these SMT until then M1 is the best CPU ever.TGL machines will throttle to peak with the thin and light garbage heatsinks. That's a given, people should stop buying these parts. Laptop batteries will be destroyed eventually and none of them will have the Dell Desktop Power plan only Workstations have that feature (Lenovo and Dell), Alienware used to have, not sure about now their A51M R1 and R2 also they had their GFX modules smoke, anyways the battery won't be available for the end user to service and the expensive machine will die and BGA with soldered HW to further limit everything, add the overheating NVMe SSDs due to poor ventilation, happens in Alienware machines too which are targeted as maximum performance.
Spunjji - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link
🤪🤡😤🤬🤥💩mode_13h - Friday, May 21, 2021 - link
Oof. Looks like *someone* is giving Emojipedia a workout!: )
Spunjji - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
This ended up how I was expecting - superior single-core performance where there's thermal headroom, dropping down to broadly competitive multi-performance at the rated TDP, and with a faintly ludicrous maximum power draw under all-core boost.I'm glad it's competitive. That's needed. What I'm a little less glad about is that we're almost certainly in for another round of CPU performance varying *wildly* between different designs, which has been true to some extent for a while, but getting steadily worse ever since Ice Lake showed up.
Given most OEMs' approach to cooling, I'd wager that the average device shipping with Cezanne will provide better CPU performance than the average device with Tiger 45 simply because of Cezanne's greater efficiency.
tekit - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
Heard they enabled undervolting again for tiger lake-h, can anyone confirm? I wonder how much undervolting potential there is and if that could balance the equation against AMD.