Intel’s Tiger Lake 11th Gen Core i7-1185G7 Review and Deep Dive: Baskin’ for the Exot

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The big notebook launch for Intel this year is Tiger Lake, its upcoming 10nm platform designed to pair a new graphics architecture with a nice high frequency for the performance that customers in this space require. Over the past few weeks, we’ve covered the microarchitecture as presented by Intel at its latest Intel Architecture Day 2020, as well as the formal launch of the new platform in early September. The missing piece of the puzzle was actually testing it, to see if it can match the very progressive platform currently offered by AMD’s Ryzen Mobile. Today is that review, with one of Intel’s reference design laptops.

Like a Tiger Carving Through The Ice

The system we have to hand is one of Intel’s Reference Design systems, which is very similar to the Software Development System (SDS) we tested for Ice Lake last year. The notebook we were sent was built in conjunction with one of Intel’s OEM partners, and is meant to act as an example system to other OEMs. This is slightly different to the software development system, which was mainly for the big company software developers (think Adobe) for code optimization, but the principle is still the same: a high powered system overbuilt for thermals and strong fans. These systems aren’t retail, and so noise and battery life aren’t part of the equation of our testing, but it also means that the performance we test should be some of the best the platform has to offer.

Our reference design review sample implements Intel’s top tier Tiger Lake ‘Core 11[sup]th[/sup] Gen’ processor, the Core i7-1185G7. This is a quad core processor with hyperthreading, offering eight threads total. This processor also has the full sized new X[sup]e[/sup]-LP graphics, with 96 execution units running up to 1450 MHz.

I haven’t mentioned the processor frequency or the power consumption, because for this generation Intel is deciding to offer its mobile processors with a range of supported speeds and feeds. To complicate the issue, Intel by definition is only publically offering it in the mix-max form, whereas those of us who are interested in the data would much rather see a sliding scale.

In this case, the Core i7-1185G7 will be offered to OEMs with thermal design points (TDPs) from 12 W to 28 W. An OEM can choose the minimum, the maximum, or something in-between, and one of the annoying things about this is that as a user, without equipment measuring the CPU power, you will not be able to tell, as the OEMs do not give the resellers this information when promoting the notebooks.

For this reference design, it has been built to offer both, so in effect it is more like a 28 W design for peak performance as to avoid any thermal issues.

At 12 W, Intel lists a base frequency of 1.2 GHz, while at 28 W, Intel lists a base frequency of 3.0 GHz. Unfortunately Intel does not list the value that we think is most valuable – 15 W – which would enable fairer comparisons with the previous generation Intel hardware as well as the competition. After testing the laptop, we can confirm that the 15 W value as programmed into the silicon (so we’re baffled why Intel wouldn’t tell us) is 1.8 GHz.

In both 12 W and 28 W scenarios, the processor can turbo up to 4.8 GHz on one core / two threads. This system was built for thermals or power to not to be an issue, so the CPU can boost to 4.8 GHz in both modes. Not only that, but the power consumption while in the turbo modes is limited to 55 W, for any TDP setting. The turbo budget for the system increases with the thermal design point of the processor, and so when in 28 W mode, it will also turbo for longer. We observed this in our testing, and you can find the results in the power section of this review.

The Reference Design

Intel sampled its Reference Design to a number of the press for testing. We had approximately 4 days with the device before it had to be handed back, enough to cover some key areas such as best-case performance on CPU and GPU, microarchitectural changes to the core and cache structure, and some industry standard benchmarks.

There were some caveats and pre-conditions to this review, similar to our initial Ice Lake development system test, because this isn’t a retail device.  The fans were fully on and the screen was on a fixed brightness. Intel also requested no battery life testing, because the system hasn't been optimized for power in the same way a retail device would - however as we only had a 4 day review loan, that meant that battery life testing wasn’t possible anyway. Intel also requested no photography of the inside of the chassis, because again this wasn’t an optimized retail device. The silicon photographs you see in this review have been provided by Intel .

When Intel’s regional PR teams started teasing the reference design on twitter (e.g. UK, FR), I initially thought this was an Honor based system due to the blue chamfered bezel like the Magicbook I reviewed earlier in the year. This isn’t an Honor machine, but rather one of the bigger OEMs known for its mix of business and gaming designs.

Large keypad, chiclet style keys, and a 1080p display. For ports, this design only has two Type-C, both of which can be used for power or DisplayPort-over-Type C. The design uses the opening of the display to act as a stand for the main body of the machine.On the back is a big vent for the airflow in. Under the conditions of the review sample we’re not able to take pictures of the insides, however it’s clear that this system was built with an extra dGPU in mind. Intel wasn’t able to comment on whether the OEM it partnered with will use this as a final design for any of its systems, given some of the extra elements added to the design to enable its use as a reference platform.

For the full system build, it was equipped with Intel’s AX201 Wi-Fi 6 module, as well as a PCIe 3.0 x4 Samsung SSD.
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