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.
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back2future - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
it's almost one could skip PCIe4 if early 2022 PCIe5 is stable on power management and performance expectations on mainboards?mode_13h - Thursday, May 20, 2021 - link
> it's almost one could skip PCIe4 if early 2022 PCIe5 is stable ... on mainboards?Uh, I'm still eager to see exactly how Intel is going to use PCIe 5, in Alder Lake. I suspect it'll be used only for the DMI link to the chipset, in fact.
Since graphics cards and M.2 SSDs aren't even close to maxing PCIe 4, I struggle to see why they would bother with the added cost and potential issues of supporting 5.
heickelrrx - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
you can put 4x link on Video card and get 8x speed on Gen 3mean they can put more stuff, with less link, not faster stuff
mode_13h - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
> you can put 4x link on Video card and get 8x speed on Gen 3In terms of power-efficiency, I'd bet the wider, slower link is better.
> mean they can put more stuff, with less link, not faster stuff
It's a laptop. So, prolly not gonna run out of PCIe lanes.
gagegfg - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
"and if anticipated, great gaming performance"...Inside this notebook case he had a hard time controlling the temperature, if you add a 100W GPU, where is the rest for this cpu?
mmm .... it's going to be interesting.
Matthias B V - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
Most OEMs still prefer Intel as it has capacity that AMD can't offer and even more it has better features and integration such as AV1 coding, USB / TB 4.0, Intel WIFI etc.Also Intels provides better support for OEMs in design and issues.
Gigaplex - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
AMD systems can provide TB support, there's no technical limitation preventing it. Intel WiFi chips are standalone cards, which also work fine in AMD systems (my AMD board has Intel WiFi). There's no reason to use an Intel CPU for either of those features.Retycint - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
The fact that not a single AMD laptop has thunderbolt, points to an issue with cost of implementation/PCI lanes limitations etc. which apparently doesn't exist on Intel CPUs, given how many Intel laptops come with TB as default. This is a fact, and talking about what's possible theoretically doesn't change the facts that AMD systems lack TBCityBlue - Monday, May 17, 2021 - link
> The fact that not a single AMD laptop has thunderbolt, points to an issue with cost of implementation/PCI lanes limitations etc.Perhaps. Or it's simply a reflection of the fact that there is only niche demand for TB.
It's on Intel based laptops because it's supported by the chipset so pretty much a no-brainer (or alternatively, Intel mandates it is included, in order to try and make it more relevant?)
However the vast majority of laptop consumers don't need, want or care about TB, so the extra cost to include it in AMD laptops doesn't appear justified. I'm sure a vendor could include TB on an AMD laptop if they ever thought they'd get a reasonable return on the extra cost.
And maybe now that Intel have been kicked in to touch by Apple, Intel might lose interest in TB in future.
TB has its fans, but it also has the distinct whiff of being the next FireWire.
RobJoy - Tuesday, May 18, 2021 - link
The fact that TB still exists, baffles me.We all should move on.