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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Spunjji - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link
He measured the power consumption, you pillock. It's right there in the review. Nice work getting your FUD on the front page though, round of applause for gondaft.If Tiger Lake H will be better in "the right chassis", Intel really should have thought of that when they supplied this one. As things stand, it's clear that this chassis wasn't causing the CPU to throttle at 45W, so the only way it would perform better is in a chassis that allows for 65W - at which point you'd find AMD's CPUs performing better, too...
5j3rul3 - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
It's a big step to intelM1 and Ryzen 5000 are powerful, Intel need more pros to getting the leading performance
mode_13h - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
This is definitely what Rocket Lake should've been. If they just put this chip in a desktop package, so it could be run with a desktop power budget and cooling, it'd sure be a lot more interesting than it is inside a laptop.Exotica - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
Yields may have been the primary concern.mode_13h - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
I get why they didn't do it, but it's clear to me this chip really wants to be a desktop CPU.whatthe123 - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
it's probably more that they've tweaked their 10nm to hit high boost at the cost of efficiency. I think they increased their gate pitch with "superfin" so you end up with more performance scaling but also more power use. considering how far behind their desktop chips are compared to 7nm chips from AMD they may just be crippling efficiency across the board to get performance parity while their fabs lag behind. they don't seem to have high hopes for 10nm considering their target for market leadership is 2024 with 7nm.laptop users generally stick with bursty operations or video games and in both cases raw throughput isn't as much of a concern. average user would probably not notice or even benefit from the high ST burst performance, but anyone planning on using it professionally would probably be better off with cezanne.
Spunjji - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
It would certainly be able to stretch its legs better there. It would be interesting to see whether it could handle running those higher boost clocks across more cores with a higher TDP. Guess we'll find out with Alder Lake.Lucky Stripes 99 - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
I thought the same. This chip in a mini-STX case with a desktop cooler would make a great portable system. However, if it is having thermal issues with a full-size workstation laptop, it'll likely struggle in the smallest of SFF cases like the NUC.Azix - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
the laptop doesn't look that that big. A nuc would have more vertical space for the cooling for example. It would also be easier to throw that heat out.mode_13h - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
Uh, the mini-STX NUCs don't really have much space. Everything is packed in pretty tightly. Furthermore, they usually top out at 28 W.For Coffee Lake, Intel made a larger system they called a "NUC", but I think they had actual Nvidia graphics cards in them and were bigger than a lot of mini-PCs.