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
SPEC CPU - Multi-Threaded Performance
Moving onto multi-threaded SPEC CPU 2017 results, these are the same workloads as on the single-threaded test (we purposefully avoid Speed variants of the workloads in ST tests). The key to performance here is not only microarchitecture or core count, but the overall power efficiency of the system and the levels of performance we can fit into the thermal envelope of the device we’re testing.
It’s to be noted that among the four chips I put into the graph, the i9-11980HK is the only one at a 45W TDP, while the AMD competition lands in at 35W, and the i7-1185G7 comes at a lower 28W. The test takes several hours of runtime (6 hours for this TGL-H SKU) and is under constant full load, so lower duration boost mechanisms don’t come into play here.
Generally as expected, the 8-core TGL-H chip leaves the 4-core TGL-U sibling in the dust, in many cases showcasing well over double the performance. The i9-11980HK also fares extremely well against the AMD competition in workloads which are more DRAM or cache heavy, however falls behind in other workloads which are more core-local and execution throughput bound. Generally that’d be a fair even battle argument between the designs, if it weren’t for the fact that the AMD systems are running at 23% lower TDPs.
In the floating-point multi-threaded suite, we again see a similar competitive scenario where the TGL-H system battles against the best Cezanne and Renoir chips.
What’s rather odd here in the results is 503.bwaves_r and 549.fotonik_r which perform far below the numbers which we were able to measure on the TGL-U system. I think what’s happening here is that we’re hitting DRAM memory-level parallelism limits, with the smaller TGL-U system and its 8x16b LPDDR4 channel memory configuration allowing for more parallel transactions as the 2x64b DDR4 channels on the TGL-H system.
In terms of the overall performance, the 45W 11980HK actually ends up losing to AMD’s Ryzen 5980HS even with 10W more TDP headroom, at least in the integer suite.
We also had initially run the suite in 65W mode, the results here aren’t very good at all, especially when comparing it to the 45W results. For +40-44% TDP, the i9-11980HK in Intel’s reference laptop only performs +9.4% better. It’s likely here that this is due to the aforementioned heavy thermal throttling the system has to fall to, with long periods of time at 35W state, which pulls down the performance well below the expected figures. I have to be explicit here that these 65W results are not representative of the full real 65W performance capabilities of the 11980HK – just that of this particular thermal solution within this Intel reference design.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
229 Comments
View All Comments
gagegfg - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
Where is the AMD "H" series? Like the 5980HX or the 5900H. It should have better multicore performance.Fulljack - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
umm Ryzen 9 5980HS is "H" series...gagegfg - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
HS <= 35WH / HX >= 45W
Linustechtips12#6900xt - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
I find it hilarious that a desktop CPU 5600x maybe even the 57/5800x would be about the same if not better power consumption with better performance LOL especially performance per watt lol.Yojimbo - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
Why? It's plugged in so what's the difference?Otritus - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link
I would assume because desktop cpus are typically tuned for performance at the cost of efficiency, and mobile processors are tuned for efficiency at the cost of performance. Power efficiency still does matter when plugged in for cooling purposes. Tiger lake needing a lot more power to deliver equal performance means higher temperatures, louder fans, or a more expensive cooling system.mode_13h - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link
> I would assume because desktop cpus are typically tuned for performance at the cost> of efficiency, and mobile processors are tuned for efficiency at the cost of performance.
I think we've established that the H-series processors are basically desktop chips in a BGA package.
> Tiger lake needing a lot more power to deliver equal performance means higher
> temperatures, louder fans, or a more expensive cooling system.
Yup. Loud fans are why I disabled turbo on my H-series Dell Precision laptop that I use for work. The only thing I hate more than performance bogging down is screaming fans in my face. And yes, I have used pressurized air to blast any dust and debris from the cooling channels.
Also, a better cooling system tends to add bulk and weight.
cyrusfox - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
One spelling comment, you have "GP Us" instead of "GPUs" on the first page, I use Text to speech, easy to catch it with that. Sorry to be the spelling guy. Thanks!cyrusfox - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
Also on the last page should be"Where things aren't" not
"Where things are quite as straightforward, is the multi-threaded performance, as this is where we have to mention TDPs, power limits, and just the result of the Intel reference platform laptop we’ve tested today."
Thank you for the indepth review! Interesting stop gap to Alder lake, With apple in the market with a pending M2, going to be a very interesting space to watch.
Linustechtips12#6900xt - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
Just wondering but could there be a comparison to an AMD 5800x or something like that just to put an idea on the power draw for the performance/ performance per watt? I was kinda curious after reading through the article a couple of times.