Intel 11th Gen Tiger Lake benchmarks leak — and AMD should be nervous

Intel 11th Gen Tiger Lake CPU
(Image credit: Intel)

Intel's Tiger Lake processors appear to be ready to strike back at AMD in the laptop processor world. This news comes from leaked benchmarks for one of the upcoming 11th generation CPUs promising solid performance. 

Several Twitter users posted snapshots of leaked benchmarks of an early engineering sample of the Intel Core i7-1185G7, a quad-core processor that uses Intel’s Tiger Lake architecture, a successor to its 10-nanometer Ice Lake architecture. One post showed the chip running at 3GHz and raking in a score of 1,414 in the Time Spy benchmark. 

APISAK, another regular leaker of benchmarks, posted that the Core i7-1185G7 managed to get a CPU score of 2,922 in the Time Spy CPU test and a graphics score of 1,296. Wccftech pointed out that the graphics score makes the Intel chip 5% faster than the AMD Ryzen 4800U, a processor that's been stealing Intel’s thunder in the laptop arena. 

While these results should be taken with a pinch of salt, it paints a positive picture for Intel’s next wave of CPUs targeted at ultraportable laptops and 2-in-1 Windows 10 machines. 

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Intel’s 10nm Ice Lake processors marked a decent uptick in both CPU and onboard GPU performance for its CPUs, which could be found in the likes of the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 and the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1. But the Tiger Lake CPUs will use Intel’s new Willow Cover core architecture, which promises a significant redesign on the Sunny Cove architecture found in the Ice Lake chips.

As such, we should expect to see improved processor performance and efficiency with the Tiger Lake chips. And graphics performance is expected to make a significant jump as well because Intel will use its new Xe GPUs for the chips' onboard graphics acceleration.

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The Ice Lake chips delivered a noticeable hike in graphic performance over their predecessors, and Tiger Lake is expected to deliver around double that performance again. 

It’s unlikely we’ll see the Tiger Lake processors before the second half of 2020. But when they do arrive, we’d expect to see them in a swathe of new and refreshed ultraportables, notably new Microsoft Surface Laptop and Surface Pro machines and 2-in-1s from the likes of Dell, HP and Lenovo. 

Roland Moore-Colyer

Roland Moore-Colyer a Managing Editor at Tom’s Guide with a focus on news, features and opinion articles. He often writes about gaming, phones, laptops and other bits of hardware; he’s also got an interest in cars. When not at his desk Roland can be found wandering around London, often with a look of curiosity on his face.