PC World - USA (2020-11)

44 PCWorld NOVEMBER 2020

REVIEWS PREVIEW: INTEL 11TH-GEN CORE I7-1185G7 TIGER LAKE

Cinebench R20, which uses AVX, AVX2,

AVX512, and also takes at least three times as

long to run as the older R15 version. That

typically hurts chips that rely on boost clocks

but doesn’t matter much in single-threaded

mode.

Against the lower-clocked 10th-gen Ice

Lake chip, the 11th-gen Tiger Lake is an

impressive 32 percent faster in single-

threaded performance. Even more impressive

is the fact that the Tiger Lake chip really only

has a 23-percent clock boost advantage over

the 10th-gen Ice Lake chip.

The 10th-gen Comet Lake U chip has on

paper a boost clock of 4.7GHz, just 2 percent

slower than the 11th-gen Tiger Lake’s 4.8GHz.

In actual performance in a single-threaded

task, however, the 11th-gen Tiger Lake is

actually 25 percent faster. Why? As we

mentioned earlier, Cinebench R20 touches

AVX, AVX2 and AVX512 during its run. On

older Intel chips, that typically results in

lowering of clock speeds, as the instructions

tend to be power-hungry. The test also takes

quite a while to run, and the 4.7GHz 10th-gen

Comet Lake U quickly fades off as the test

grinds on. It seems to be a limitation of the

older, hotter 14nm process on which Comet

Lake U is built.

The Ryzen 7 4800U, with its max boost

clock of 4.2GHz, actually beats the other two

Intel chips. But it can’t touch the new 11th-gen

Tiger Lake chip, which appears to hit and hold

the 4.8GHz without issues. That ends up

giving the 11th-gen Tiger Lake an impressive

23-percent advantage.

What this test and the PCMark 10 app test

should tell you is Tiger Lake is the new ruler of

single-threaded performance. There’s nothing

else that remotely comes close.

RYZEN’S CORE ADVANTAGE

The problem for Tiger Lake, as you knew

was coming, is the other side of the

equation in its fight with Ryzen: Core gap.

The Ryzen 7 4800U’s 8 cores with SMT

yield very real performance in applications

that can use them, even if they are

specialized. You can see that in Cinebench

R20’s test using all available threads of the

CPUs. The Ryzen simply walks away from

every single Intel CPU here, turning in a

score 53 percent faster than the 11th-gen

Tiger Lake. That’s a crushing advantage.

Intel will argue that very few people are

Intel Ref 4/8 Tiger Lake (Core i7-1185G7/Iris XE) 41W PL1+ DT

Intel Ref 4/8 Tiger Lake (Core i7-1185G7/Iris XE) 28W PL1+ DT

Intel Ref 4/8 Tiger Lake (Core i7-1185G7/Iris XE) 28W PL1

Intel Ref 4/8 Tiger Lake (Core i7-1185G7/Iris XE) 15W PL1

Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 7390 4/8 Tiger Lake (Core i7-1065G7/Iris Plus) 46WPL1

Dell XPS 13 7390 6/12 Ice Lake (Core i7-10710U/HD) 22W PL1

Lenovo Slim 7 8/16 Matisse (Ryzen 7 4800U/Radeon) 38W PL1

Cinebench R20 1T

Single-threaded performance

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

599

456

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488

600

477

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