Intel Tiger Lake shatters Ice Lake performance in new benchmark — should AMD be worried?

Intel Tiger Lake
(Image credit: Intel)

With the recent revelation that Intel's 7-nanometer chips aren't going to arrive until late 2022 or early 2023 the company could really use a win. Especially as AMD is scheduled to release its 5-nanometer chips by then and there's the whole ARM-based movement from Apple and others that looks like it may finally have a chance. 

Tiger Lake isn't going to single-handedly right the ship for Intel. But the latest SiSoftware benchmarks for the Core i7-1165G7 outed by leakster @TUM_APISAK are showing a significant performance leap for the new processor over Ice Lake along with a few new details (via Tom's Hardware). 

According to the benchmarks, the Core i7-1165G7 will include a quad-core, eight-thread processor running at 2.8GHz base and 4.7GHz boost clock. What hadn't been seen in previous benchmarks was the boost in L3 cache per core, the Tiger Lake processor showed 12MB of L3 cache up from 8MB on last year's Core i7-1065G7 Ice Lake processor which should deliver a significant boost in multitasking performance.

Turning to the multimedia test scores, the Core i7-1165G7 Tiger Lake put up a score of 564.87Mpix/s as compared to 378.63Mpix/s for the Core i7-1065G7 Ice Lake, a 49.2% performance boost.

(Image credit: TUM_APISAK/Twitter)

Unfortunately for Intel, the chart also includes the AMD Ryzen 7 4800U with Radeon graphics and that puts the Tiger Lake performance to shame with a score of 744.54Mpix/s, 31.8% faster than Intel's latest and greatest. It is worth noting that AMD's chipset uses an eight-core and 16-thread design, literally double that of Intel, but again the architecture advantage isn't going away anytime soon.

What this benchmark doesn't show off is the graphics prowess of Tiger Lake with its Intel Gen12 Xe GPU. However, it's something that we have seen deliver both amazing benchmarks against discrete Nvidia GPUs and real-world performance running Battlefield V on a prototype laptop. Whether the apparent GPU advantage will yield superior real-world results to AMD for some specific use cases will be an interesting question heading into Tiger Lake's release.

We expect that official Tiger Lake release to come on September 2, Intel invited us to a virtual event that day simply promising that it would showcase "how Intel is pushing the boundaries of how we work and keep connected." Hopefully, we'll get a good look at what the shipping version of Tiger Lake can do and of course there will be a flood of new laptops featuring these CPUs coming shortly thereafter.

Sean Riley

Sean Riley has been covering tech professionally for over a decade now. Most of that time was as a freelancer covering varied topics including phones, wearables, tablets, smart home devices, laptops, AR, VR, mobile payments, fintech, and more.  Sean is the resident mobile expert at Laptop Mag, specializing in phones and wearables, you'll find plenty of news, reviews, how-to, and opinion pieces on these subjects from him here. But Laptop Mag has also proven a perfect fit for that broad range of interests with reviews and news on the latest laptops, VR games, and computer accessories along with coverage on everything from NFTs to cybersecurity and more.