Intel’s Tiger Lake 11th Gen Core I7-1185G7 Review | Hacker News Reader

Intel’s Tiger Lake 11th Gen Core I7-1185G7 Review

anandtech.com

48 pointsyread53 comments

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.

Given than the Ryzen 4000U (Zen 2) series was the first time AMD has been really competitive in laptop chips in a long time, it's not surprising that the high end features aren't there. Especially since whatever the OEM puts the AMD chips into seems to be selling. (Of courses, in today's market, almost any laptop will sell, there's a ton of demand and not enough supply) I'd expect to see higher end designs for the Zen 3 laptops, especially if AMD is able to get more fab time and make enough chips.

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

/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

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?

Spot on! I'm shopping for a new laptop for the past two months, and I'm having a hard time finding a Ryzen 7 laptop that has a good screen and is light weight. There are series of MSI laptops that fit the battery, screen, and build quality I'm looking for, but they all ship with Intel processors.

With all Ryzen 7 available today:

- Asus G14 and G15 are the only models with 35W R7 4800HS CPUs. G14 is too small screen, and they both turn into furnaces under load (hovering 95°C)

- MSI alpha series don't offer 4000 series yet?

- Lenovo Legion/Ideapad come with an HDD bay and smaller battery life (~48 Wh).

The only one I find good enough is HP Omen 15 2020 model. It's not available anywhere in Europe or Asia as far as I could search. Only on best buy US and Canada.

Just an FYI, most modern laptop chips will hit up to 100C under load. That's just how they're designed to operate.

The bigger problem with the equivalent Ryzen is that it simply isn't available. OEMs are avoiding it because they wouldn't be able to keep it in stock.

it's changing. i'm seeing more highend laptops with amd chip now

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.

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!

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

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.anandtech.com/show/15971/intels-11th-gen-core-ti...

My impression was that Sunny/Willow Cove was still an iteration on Skylake, just a larger one than all the other Lakes Intel had to come up with in the past years. Perhaps I'm just confused since all the architecture writeups compare it to Skylake, just with boosted internal specifications.

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.

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.

The treatment of AVX-512 as some sort of weird benchmarketing trick is probably well deserved (given Intel's misfires in this area) but I'm not sure it's 100% reasonable.

Anything that can be sped up with AVX2 can likely be further sped up with AVX-512, and some aspects of the ABI make it more likely that AVX-512 (especially in its ICL/TGL flavor) will be able to be more broadly applicable. Notably, masked operations and a reasonable scatter/gather implementation make it more likely that an algorithm can be rewritten as SIMD.

The clock license penalties with AVX-512 are also mitigated on ICL/TGL.

Don't get me wrong: I still think it's an uphill battle for Intel to get broader acceptance for AVX-512 (and they are their own worst enemy with many decisions, like fusing off everything beyond SSE4.2 on Celeron/Pentium branded products), and some (not all) of the workloads that are nice on AVX-512 are also pretty nice on GPGPU.

Here is some more divination stuff: https://www.tomshardware.com/features/intel-11th-gen-tiger-l...

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.

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.

Ars Technica has a video of the Intel system going from a dead stop to Windows desktop in 7 seconds, but I trust Intel to get this right (look at the way a NUC boots) and I absolutely do not trust any laptop maker to follow their example.

I dislike technical reviews that try to go cleverly literary. It's impossible to divine whtat "sardine oil basting AMD" is supposed to mean. It's not a meme, it's not a common expression. And for non-native English speakers, it is even more confusing. And it violates the first principle of reviews: putting the interests of the reader first.

I was equally confused. I thought it was some USA/Canadian phrase I'd never encountered before but it seems like it's another reference to Tiger King (in addition to the one in the title).

Apparently, people suspect Carole Baskin for murder based on a comment she made about covering someone in "sardine oil or something they want to eat". [1]

Even now I understand it, it still sticks out as an odd phrase to use.

  [1]: https://www.sausageroll.com.au/entertainment/shows/did-carole-baskin-confess-to-the-murder-of-her-husband-on-tiger-king/

"Very much on top" if you ignore the page 10 (Office)

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review...

30%+ faster than previous generation, 20%+ faster than 65W AMD part in Kraken and Octane

I think you might have missed that there are multiple pages of the article. You can select it in the bottom of page. There are multiple benchmarks showing what is better and worse than comparable AMD chips.

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.

How will this fare against A14?

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.

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

This tweet from their editor-in-chief sheds some light on it:

> Sorry gang, no RTX 3080 review today. The last week and a half has taken an unexpectedly large toll. I'm looking at getting caught up in time for the RTX 3090 launch next week.

https://twitter.com/RyanSmithAT/status/1306197243263737857

Seems that their GPU reviewer lives near the US forest fires. https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/1306219044023005185

That might explain it. Those fires seem pretty serious.

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.

Nvidia seeds review cards to reviewers they care about. It would be shocking if AnandTech weren't on that list. I believe they said their review is delayed for personal reasons; AnandTech is good enough that they don't need to be out there on day 1 grabbing clicks. People will read their reviews even if they're a little out of the hype cycle.

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

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

Seen a 3090 on eBay, bidding is at $11k. Only promises to ship when released

It has to be some sort of scam bid. You can go out and buy five Titan RTXes (or Quadro equivalent) and get started on your $11k worth of work right now. Or buy GPU time From The Cloud, which sure is pricey, but not $11k-for-a-$1500-graphics-card pricey.

I can definitely see why people want the RTX 3090, it's a pretty good GPU... but I don't think there is any way people could do the cost/benefit analysis and decide that $11k is the right price to pay.

Actually Cloud does cost $11K for a $1500 GPU, due to Nvidia datacenter licensing restrictions.

This mainly applies to people who need to run GPU nearly all the time, not just a couple of hours per day.

https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2018/01/03/nvidia_server_gpu...

And of course you can't play ultra high end game settings on the cloud.

3090 isn’t officially released yet, this one “fell off the truck” and people are willing to bid it up to be the first one who gets it

Do reviewers not have 3090s yet? They certainly had 3080s well before launch day.

Yes, but review samples are NVIDIA property, you can't (legally) sell them.

No matter how you slice it, this one "fell off the truck" somewhere, it's an unreleased product, you're not supposed to have it yet.

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

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.

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.

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.

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-...

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

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

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

So it turns out these names refer to actual lakes indeed (of the remaining three I mentioned, the two are in Ontario and one in Minnesota). It did not occur to me to search Google Maps directly: seems they are not notable enough to have Wikipedia entries, which is where I checked.

Still, the bigger point is: what purpose do such compound names serve? Early on the codenames were simpler, e.g. Katmai (Pentium III), Banias (Pentium M), Yonah (Core Solo/Duo). Specifically, what additional information is conveyed by the "Lake" categorization, where within the same broad product group (CPUs) some projects are called "Lake," and some others are "non-Lake?"

If there is actually some distinction (client/server/embedded perhaps?), wouldn't such a codename be self-defeating by revealing too much ("Something Lake" announced makes it obvious Intel is working on a client CPU)? And if it's meaningless then using two words when one would suffice seems redundant.

"Coffee Lake" is more memorable and easily pronounceable than Banias, in my opinion. I think that's the only reason.

Between the two it's a matter of preference. Personally I enjoyed the Israeli codenames, especially as they were borne by several really good CPU designs at the time, whereas the more mainstream in terms of its naming Willamette/Prescott (Pentium IV) was a big disappointment. I understand they'd wanted to simplify the names though. Still, why not just "Tiger" instead of "Tiger Lake" then? (A rhetorical question at this point perhaps.)

Tiger isn't a lake, it's a cat. Tiger Lake is a lake.

Tiger is a town in Georgia, which, unlike all these lakes, even has a Wikipedia entry, [1] so the name definitely qualifies under the policy of using geographic locations as codenames as well.

However, since the location names used under this policy are so obscure few people (including an Intel employee in a parallel comment) even realize they refer to actual places, the whole naming convention arguably makes little sense at this point.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger,_Georgia

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