
Intel’s Tiger Lake 11th Gen Core I7-1185G7 Review - yread
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review-deep-dive-core-11th-gen/
======
toastal
Even with AMD's better performance, OEMs are still shipping their flagship
with Intel since Intel partnered in many of the laptop designs. I really
wanted to hop on the Ryzen train, but USB4 isn't here yet (despite being able
to, no devices have Thunderbolt), the displays for Ryzen models are all
lackluster, and other premium features seem to be missing. With this being the
case along with the number single-core performance means to some and the Xe
graphics overhaul, Intel is still in a great spot on mobile.

~~~
IntelMiner
I made the mistake of buying a T14s to replace an aging POS Xiaomi (and get
off the world of "switchable graphics" forever)

The colour accuracy on the screen given was something like 37%. When I enabled
any sort of colour shifting program, it would go completely sideways.
Comparing it to a $300 (AUD) Oppo cell phone
[https://i.imgur.com/Rnh6leC.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Rnh6leC.jpg)

/r/AMDLaptops has a surprisingly comprehensive guide of what is out there at
what price points and markets

After Lenovo refused to replace the panel with the only part their own forums
stated was the "good" SKU, I purchased the only other seemingly decent looking
Ryzen 4000 laptop. The MSI Modern 14

I think the best description I can give of the laptop is "I like it but"

It has a nice screen, the keyboard is comfortable (and doesn't have an
annoying layout like the Thinkpad with the FN/Ctrl keys)

But the tradeoffs for it are

\- No USB-C charging. The USB-C port doesn't support power delivery (and is
only 5Gbps, not 10Gbps)

\- The SSD is utter garbage. 480 gig on a single NAND flash chip. I was having
Linux stall on writing PNG icon files to the chip for 10~ seconds at a time
while installing XFCE4!

\- USB 2.0 in 2020 shouldn't be a thing on an "Ultrabook" laptop

\- The Ryzen model only has a 6 thread(?) CPU, and it does get a bit toasty
with the "meh" cooling fan in the laptop

~~~
m_mueller
I find Lenovo's QA and support absolutely atrocious. My organization bought a
ton of ThinkPad X1 Yogas - quite expensive devices. Turns out that everyone's
TouchPad would stop working properly (intermittent 2 second lags every couple
of seconds) when waking up from a screen-off in battery mode. Workaround is
closing the lid to bring it into standby, open it and sign in again. Thousands
of users reporting the same thing for various models over the last 2.5 years,
absolutely no response from Lenovo. Do only Apple users expect their stuff to
actually work and hold them to that standard?

------
jeffbee
These single-threaded results are spectacular. This laptop posts a web browser
performance score (on Speedometer 2) higher than any system AnandTech has ever
tested, save one (a Core i9-10900K, a factory overclock in essence). A laptop
that beats almost all high-end desktop systems in web browser performance
would be nice to have.

~~~
DCKing
This is a really important result for Intel, as they might continue to keep on
being competitive for certain workloads. Intel managing to eek out some more
life out of the one thing they still had (and were about to lose): single
thread performance.

One thing that Intel has done incredibly well these past five years is eeking
out every damn thing out of Skylake they had (IIUC this is still fundamentally
an iteration on Skylake, albeit the biggest we had since 2015). Their
inability to improve process and architecture is painful to watch but man have
they stretched what they already had under this competitive pressure.

That power consumption though, oof. Anything that is remotely multithreaded
suffers immediately, and this will be obliterated again by Zen 3 APUs, and
likely Apple's A14X. But there's some chance now they will still be able to
win _some_ benchmarks against AMD and Apple into next year, so good for them!

~~~
formerly_proven
This isn't a Skylake-derived CPU, this is a Willow Cove CPU, which is based on
a new uarch.

~~~
profile53
AFAIK the lineage can be traced all the back to Sandy Bridge in 2011.
Fundamentally, it seems Willow Cove is an iteration of Skylake which in turn
is an iteration of Sandy Bridge. Some buses and internal caches were widened
but the general structure is fairly similar to Sandy Bridge.

Some quick review suggests the big change for Willow Cove was a cache redesign
[1]. The previous generation, Sunny Cove, added widened reorder buffers, a
larger L1 data cache, added components to some integer units (including an
integer division unit), doubled the load/store buffers, and widened the vector
units to handle 512 bit instructions without splitting them (like Ryzen
currently does). But, the architecture and core structure is still the same as
Skylake. Same number of integer, vector, and floating point units, fairly
similar front end, etc.

For reference: [https://www.hardwaretimes.com/intel-sunny-cove-vs-
zen-2-core...](https://www.hardwaretimes.com/intel-sunny-cove-vs-zen-2-core-
architectures-comparing-comet-lake-ice-lake-and-ryzen-3000/)
[https://www.anandtech.com/show/15971/intels-11th-gen-core-
ti...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/15971/intels-11th-gen-core-tiger-lake-
soc-detailed-superfin-willow-cove-and-xelp/3)

------
ColanR
There's almost no comparisons made to AMD in the article, which I would have
been interested in. Last sentence:

> Tiger Lake isn’t sardine oil basting AMD just yet, but it stands to compete
> well in a number of key markets.

That just sounds like a polite way of saying that AMD is still very much on
top.

~~~
ChuckMcM
_The new Tiger Lake stills falls down against the competition when we start
discussing raw throughput tests. Intel was keen to promote professional
workflows with Tiger Lake, or gaming workflows such as streaming, particularly
at 28 W rather than at 15 W. Despite this we can easily see that the 15 W
Renoir options with eight cores can blow past Tiger Lake in a like-for-like
scenario in our rendering tests and our scalable workloads. The only times
Intel scores a win is due to accelerator support (AVX-512, DP4a, DL Boost). On
top of that, Renoir laptops in the market are likely to be in a cheaper price
bracket than what Intel seems to be targeting._

As I read this, and other reviews/analysis of the Tiger Lake node I can see
Intel competing with the only tool it has left, specialized instruction sets.
This continues to create a gap between things built for "i86-64" architecture
vs "x86-64" architectures. What I expect to see from that is Intel touting
performance advantages in applications that I don't use, and never comparing
the performance of applications I do use. This is a bad place for Intel to be,
but it is kind of like sailboat racing. In sailboat racing one boat can appear
to be ahead of its rival to non-sailors, but sailors who know the boat is
going to have to tack to make the mark recognize it is actually behind.

So much of technology is like this, where the choices today ripple through the
opportunities and choices you will have in the future, trying to guess which
are the important ones feels more like divination than decision making.

This is the second time AMD has made some good decisions that have resulted in
an advantage. AMD's challenge has been to make these sorts of decisions on a
regular enough cadence to _maintain_ that advantage. If I were a leader in the
CPU architecture or the manufacturing processes group at AMD I would be soooo
stressed these days.

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
Here is some more divination stuff:
[https://www.tomshardware.com/features/intel-11th-gen-
tiger-l...](https://www.tomshardware.com/features/intel-11th-gen-tiger-lake-
superfin-10nm-benchmarks)

which I've found to be more informative regarding the memory- and the bus-
bandwith.

tl;dr would be it has about 50% more peak memory bandwith than the best Renoir
from AMD, which translates to about one third when all its cores use that. And
can dynamically downclock the ring-bus and memory-interface while the cores
are running at full speed. Which depending on the task can be good or bad for
the task, but always good for battery. While AMD is still on top of that when
all cores are used, because it has twice many of them.

edit: Some other report mentioned almost instaneous resume, and never more
than 8 seconds boot time from cold start to running desktop.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Agreed, however there is a caveat. One of the things we discovered at NetApp
doing performance analysis of Intel vs AMD designs (during the early Opteron
days) is that Intel's memory bandwidth was constrained by the transaction rate
of their memory controller. Between pre-fetch traffic and pointer jumping
workloads (which cause frequent TLB invalidation) they were never able to
actually reach their theoretical bandwidth even with static ram instead of
DRAM on the memory bus.

------
ksec
I am sort of sad to see those numbers, not because they are bad, but they are
better than what I expected. And I cant help but think had Intel had this in
2018 as they were originally scheduled. Apple wouldn't have to switch over to
ARM ( Yet ). These CPUs are 25W, meaning not MacBook Pro TDP range.

Even though I intensely dislike the new keyboard, not fond of the Touch Bar,
at least I could get a x86 compatible MacBook. Now it is increasingly looking
like the current Intel MacBook Pro may be the last.

------
person_of_color
How will this fare against A14?

------
intricatedetail
AMD is still behind when it comes to real-time signal processing. Ryzen
benchmarks look impressive, but sadly they can't top Intel's single core
performance.

------
tus88
Anyone know why Anand hasn't reviewed the 3080 yet?

~~~
ChuckMcM
Have you seen a 3080 somewhere? Like in a store where you could buy it? :-).
Could just be the Bay Area but those things seem to be pretty scarce.

~~~
jeffbee
You can't buy a Tiger Lake in a store, either.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Don't disagree, but the GTX3080 is, in theory, shipping. Whereas Tiger Lake is
a chip preview without any manufacturers yet announcing product. :-)

------
akmittal
Intel has really improved their GPU. Intel 11th gen come with av1 hardware
decode, amd does not even do VP9.

~~~
vetinari
AMD does VP9 since Raven Ridge (i.e. since introducing VCN). The last chip
without VP9 was Vega.

All GPUs coming this year support AV1 decode: Intel gen11, AMD Navi 2 and
Nvidia RTX 30.

~~~
axaxs
The new 4000 series ryzen chips have vega graphics, if we're comparing apples
to apples with Intel. I have no idea what they decode, just pointing that out.

~~~
vetinari
With Vega, I meant discrete cards. They feature Unified Video Decoder (UVD).

APUs, while they contain cut-down Vegas, use Video Core Next (VCN) for video.
It is worth saying, that the new 4000 series Ryzen APUs use VCN 2.0, which
does NOT support AV1 decoding. For that, VNC 3.0 is needed, which is coming
with Navi 2 chips.

------
4cao
If they can't come up with any better products at the moment, they could at
least ditch these National Geographic-themed compound codenames: Coffee Lake,
Whiskey Lake, Kaby Lake (named after a Portuguese footballer?) and now it's
Tiger Lake for a change.

Since there isn't even a single "lake" named after something that can actually
be found _in_ a lake or _near_ it, such as an aquatic animal, and there are
also products from the same category with unrelated codenames (East Beach,
Basin Falls, Chief River, River Forest, Forest Crystal, etc.) [1] why not just
keep the first noun only and make things simpler. It's not as if it would
cause any further confusion at this point.

1\. List of some recent Intel codenames (not for the faint-hearted):
[https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/design/products-
and-...](https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/design/products-and-
solutions/processors-and-chipsets/platform-codenames.html)

~~~
zokier
Intel CPUs have been named after geographic locations since Pentium II days.

For the record, this is the lake gen11 is named after
[https://goo.gl/maps/qGDcVhrudoEJZou18](https://goo.gl/maps/qGDcVhrudoEJZou18)

~~~
williadc
Thanks for this. I worked on Tiger Lake and no one ever told us it was a real
lake.

~~~
srtjstjsj
I think that's on you to catch on to the pattern after 30 years.

