Color me very unimpressed. Yet another modest improvement combined with Intel apparently still insisting on overly complicated SKUs, only now they seem to be making it harder for consumers to research computers based on the processor. Here's my translation of the article, which seems (intentionally?) worded to put the middling improvements in their best light:
"In Cinebench R15 (CB15), the single-thread performance gains are immediately evident with the Core i7-1165G7 bagging a 24% higher score compared to the Ice Lake Core i7-1065G7. Both the Core i7-1165G7 and the Core i5-1135G7 are faster (15% and 7%, respectively) than the Comet Lake-U Core i7-10710U, which is actually a 6C/12T part. In fact, the Core i7-1165G7 easily overtakes both the AMD Ryzen 5 4500U and the Ryzen 7 4700U with leads of up to 24% in single-core."
When comparing Intel's brand-new, yet to be released, top of the line CPU with the slower i7 of the previous gen (Ice Lake has less cores and slower CPU performance in exchange for better GPU performance), it's a whopping 24% faster. But that's not really saying much, and the next sentence is more representative of typical gen-to-gen improvements with Intel, with a more modest improvement of 15%, though, to be fair, that's actually better than usual, especially considering the Comet Lake is a hexa-core chip. It then goes on to say that this brand-new (and, once again, yet to be released) chip is up to 24% faster than the Ryzen 5 and 7 that have been out for months and, the way it's worded, I read as being up to (as in probably often less, but one test had this much difference) 24% faster than the Ryzen 5, AMD's mid-tier chip, whereas the gains over the Ryzen 7 are probably a fair bit less. I would hope their cutting edge i7 could beat a months-old Ryzen 5 by a good bit; that's nothing to really brag about. And I suspect it's only marginally better than the Ryzen 7, and that's for single-threaded performance, so multi-threaded it'll probably be pretty close.
"Understandably though, the Core i7-10710U leads in CB15 multi-core but not by a significant margin — it is only 8% faster than the Core i7-1165G7 and the latter is in turn just 3% slower than the Ryzen 7 4700U, which is an 8C/8T part. Good gains are also seen with the Core i5-1135G7, which seems to be about 14% faster than the Ice Lake Core i5-1035G7 and 22% faster than the Core i7-1065G7. "
So the brand-new i7 is 8% slower than the last-gen i7 (granted, it has two less cores, but the simple fact is "upgrading" to Tiger Lake from Comet Lake will result in a decrease in performance, regardless of why) and, as I suspected with my earlier statement, it's close to (and actually behind) the (again, *months old*) Ryzen 7. So it's essentially (maybe) slightly faster in single-threaded performance and slightly slower in multi-threaded performance vs an older chip. And I'm guessing the last statement in that paragraph is mixed up, since it makes no sense that it would be 14% faster than the Ice Lake i5 and 22% faster than the i7. Assuming it's 22% faster than the i5 and 14% faster than the i7, I do have to say that's pretty respectable, however, it's just not good enough. Improving significantly over a poorly performing product isn't anything to get excited about. If you have a low baseline, a large improvement can still result in a mediocre product, which is exactly the case here. Yes, they appear to have improved quite a bit from Comet/Ice Lake, but they're still only at the level of the current-gen Ryzen chips, not exactly newsworthy.
Things get a little better at this point, with the TL i5 outperforming the R7 by 10% in single-threaded performance, which is quite impressive. I don't know what the difference is between R15 (CB15) and R20 (CB20) tests, and why the latter seems to show much better single-threaded gains (or maybe the prior also does, but that's not shown by how it's worded, as mentioned before). But then we get to multi-threaded performance and, once again, TL actually loses (again) to Ryzen and Comet Lake. Then we get to 3DMark 11, where TL finally shows some real promise, actually besting the R7 by 18%. Of course, when you actually look at the graphic, you see that while it beats the R7 4700u, it loses to the (again, months old) R7 4800u. So still not impressed.
On the graphics side, it does look like TL supercedes Ryzen but, again, not by a significant margin, nothing groundbreaking anyways.
A couple other things to keep in mind with all of this: 1) while it's possible performance will improve as it gets closer to production, these benchmarks are comparing TL in a (probably optimized, with excellent cooling) test platform vs Comet Lake, Ice Lake, and Ryzen in production systems, most/all of which limit the full capabilities of the chips due to insufficent cooling, design (i.e. making them run at lower TDP to keep heat down or battery life up), or crappy firmware/drivers; and 2) even with possible gains over current Ryzen chips, that will likely only last a couple months before AMD takes back the crown, not to mention almost certainly continuing to be cheaper as well. It really seems to me that we are back to how things were when the Athlon 64 came out, with AMD crushing Intel and Intel struggling just to keep up. Hopefully this time AMD will be able to hold on to the lead, at least for longer than before, and hopefully if/when they do lose it, they'll at least be able to stay closer to Intel.
If I've misinterpreted or otherwise misunderstood something, please let me know, but as of right now, based on this article I'll probably be looking for an AMD laptop over TL, all else being equal.
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