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
Conclusion: Powerful, but Power Hungry
After last week’s reveal of Tiger Lake-H, today’s results put things into context for Intel’s new high-end enthusiast mobile platform. The new design follows roughly 8 months after our initial coverage of the lower power “regular” Tiger Lake design and SKUs. The question is whether the new Tiger Lake-H can differentiate itself beyond just the notion that it’s a doubled-up core count variant of the lower power models.
I’ll have to reiterate that our review today isn’t nearly as in-depth as usual – due to circumstances we’ve essentially only had 2 days’ worth of testing of Intel’s reference Tiger Lake-H laptop, however in this time I think we can come to some crucial conclusions as to how the design performs and where it positions itself against the competition.
From a feature perspective, the new Tiger Lake-H platform seemingly delivers, offering up the necessary I/O and platform features to enable it to compete in the super high-end enthusiast and desktop-replacement laptop market.
Obvious requirements for this segment are also unquestioned performance metrics, and it’s here where things become rather complicated for the new 8-core Willow Cove design.
The area where the new TGL-H and particularly today’s tested Core i9-11980HK performs extremely well and is undoubtedly the leader among mobile x86 CPUs, is in its single-threaded performance. The new Willow Cove CPU cores alongside with the extremely high 5GHz boost frequencies achieved by the chip means that it manages to differentiate itself to even AMD’s more recent Cezanne Zen3 based Ryzen Mobile chips. While the performance lead isn’t large, it’s extremely solid at a 7-10% advantage throughout a very large number of workloads throughout our test suite.
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.
The system, as delivered by Intel, came with a default maximum 65W cTDP/PL1 setting, which is the i9 11980HK’s maximum advertised power setting. Unfortunately for the SKU, the reference laptop’s thermal design was not able to keep up with the power output of the chip under this setting, and we had to revert the system to Intel’s advertised default 45W PL1 setting for the chip. The 65W mode was just not sustainable, with noticeable thermal tripping down to 35W as well as peak temperatures of up to 96°C. In our multi-threaded SPEC tests, we saw the 65W mode only perform 9% better than the 45W mode even though in theory it’s supposed to have a 44% larger thermal envelope.
At 45W, the multi-threaded performance of the chip is well sustainable and reasonable for this kind of device form-factor and cooling solution, but here it needs to be put into context, particularly against the nearest competition, which is AMD’s Ryzen 9 5980HS. In our benchmarks, both the Core i9-11980HK and the Ryzen 9 5980HS battle it out, sometimes with the Intel chip coming ahead, sometimes with the AMD chip leading the results. The issue with this comparison though is that we’re comparing a 45W chip vs a 35W chip, and more often in compute heavy workloads such as rendering or encoding, the AMD chip comes ahead even though it has a lower TDP.
Intel’s new 10nm SuperFin process had promised to finally outperform the mature 14nm node – while we couldn’t get to a definitive conclusion based on the initial 4-core Tiger Lake designs due to the smaller core numbers, here in 8-core vs 8-core scenario at their latest microarchitecture implementations, we can still see that Intel is lagging behind in terms of efficiency versus AMD’s 7nm CPUs.
This leads us to the conclusion and question for whom the new Tiger Lake-H designs are meant for. The market in recent years has generally attempted to switch away from bulkier desktop-replacement laptops, but it’s precisely this product segment which seems to be what Intel is targeting with TGL-H. A thicker device with more robust cooling capabilities would certainly unleash the new 8-core design’s performance, but unfortunately, exactly where this performance would end up is something we unfortunately weren’t able to answer in today’s piece.
The rest of the market generally is pivoting towards high-performance compact designs within that crucial <20mm thickness. While Tiger Lake-H here certainly delivers large generational performance improvements to previous SKUs in the H-series, such as Comet Lake-H, it doesn’t seem to be sufficient to quite catch up to the AMD alternatives which while maybe not as performant in every workload, do win it out on an efficiency basis.
As Intel noted in its launch event, Tiger Lake-H is said to already have 80+ enthusiast designs in the works, likely to come out in the next few months to rest of the year. The final verdict on TGL-H will be in final commercial products, which we expect to see in the next month or two.
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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.