6 ms·

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

48 points by yread 6y ago

ColanR 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    Here is some more divination stuff: https://www.tomshardware.com/features/intel-11th-gen-tiger-lake-superfin-10nm-benchmarks 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.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      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.
    - ChuckMcM 6y ago
      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.
  - glangdale 6y ago
    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.
- yread 6y ago
  "Very much on top" if you ignore the page 10 (Office) https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review-deep-dive-core-11th-gen/10 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
- ternaryoperator 6y ago
  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.
  - mcroft 6y ago
    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/
- YetAnotherNick 6y ago
  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.
tus88 6y ago
Anyone know why Anand hasn't reviewed the 3080 yet?
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    You can't buy a Tiger Lake in a store, either.
    - ChuckMcM 6y ago
      Don't disagree, but the GTX3080 is, in theory, shipping. Whereas Tiger Lake is a chip preview without any manufacturers yet announcing product. :-)
  - outoftheabyss 6y ago
    Seen a 3090 on eBay, bidding is at $11k. Only promises to ship when released
    - jrockway 6y ago
      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.
      - paulmd 6y ago
        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
jeffbee 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    This isn't a Skylake-derived CPU, this is a Willow Cove CPU, which is based on a new uarch.
    - profile53 6y ago
      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-architectures-comparing-comet-lake-ice-lake-and-ryzen-3000/ https://www.hardwaretimes.com/intel-sunny-cove-vs-zen-2-core... https://www.anandtech.com/show/15971/intels-11th-gen-core-tiger-lake-soc-detailed-superfin-willow-cove-and-xelp/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15971/intels-11th-gen-core-ti...
akmittal 6y ago
Intel has really improved their GPU. Intel 11th gen come with av1 hardware decode, amd does not even do VP9.
- vetinari 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
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-solutions/processors-and-chipsets/platform-codenames.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/design/products-and-...
- zokier 6y ago
  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
  - 4cao 6y ago
    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.
    - 6y ago
toastal 6y ago
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.
- toast0 6y ago
  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.
- tuananh 6y ago
  it's changing. i'm seeing more highend laptops with amd chip now
- Ayesh 6y ago
  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.
  - CountHackulus 6y ago
person_of_color 6y ago
How will this fare against A14?
ksec 6y ago
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.
intricatedetail 6y ago
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.

48 points by yread 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  Here is some more divination stuff: https://www.tomshardware.com/features/intel-11th-gen-tiger-lake-superfin-10nm-benchmarks 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.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    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.
  - ChuckMcM 6y ago
    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.
- glangdale 6y ago
  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.
yread 6y ago
"Very much on top" if you ignore the page 10 (Office) https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review-deep-dive-core-11th-gen/10 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
ternaryoperator 6y ago
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.
- mcroft 6y ago
  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/
YetAnotherNick 6y ago
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.

tus88 6y ago

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

ChuckMcM 6y ago
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 6y ago
  You can't buy a Tiger Lake in a store, either.
  - ChuckMcM 6y ago
    Don't disagree, but the GTX3080 is, in theory, shipping. Whereas Tiger Lake is a chip preview without any manufacturers yet announcing product. :-)
- outoftheabyss 6y ago
  Seen a 3090 on eBay, bidding is at $11k. Only promises to ship when released
  - jrockway 6y ago
    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.
    - paulmd 6y ago
      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

jeffbee 6y ago

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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  This isn't a Skylake-derived CPU, this is a Willow Cove CPU, which is based on a new uarch.
  - profile53 6y ago
    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-architectures-comparing-comet-lake-ice-lake-and-ryzen-3000/ https://www.hardwaretimes.com/intel-sunny-cove-vs-zen-2-core... https://www.anandtech.com/show/15971/intels-11th-gen-core-tiger-lake-soc-detailed-superfin-willow-cove-and-xelp/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15971/intels-11th-gen-core-ti...

akmittal 6y ago

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

vetinari 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago

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-solutions/processors-and-chipsets/platform-codenames.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/design/products-and-...

zokier 6y ago
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
- 4cao 6y ago
  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.
  - 6y ago

toastal 6y ago

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.

toast0 6y ago
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.
tuananh 6y ago
it's changing. i'm seeing more highend laptops with amd chip now
Ayesh 6y ago
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.
- CountHackulus 6y ago

person_of_color 6y ago

How will this fare against A14?

ksec 6y ago

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.

intricatedetail 6y ago

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.