Intel Core i7-1065G7 Benchmarked: Ice Lake with Iris Plus Graphics

This has been a long time coming, as we ‘re last getting about to testing Intel ’ south Ice Lake architecture. This is Intel ’ s first veridical try at a 10nm CPU, and in this review we ’ ll be comparing it against their 14nm offerings to see how it stacks up in terms of performance .
last class we did see the 10nm ‘Cannon Lake ‘ but it was a single processor, the Core i3-8121U, a measly dual-core clocked at up to 3.2 GHz with no integrate graphics. It was used in a one Lenovo laptop plus a small handful of NUCs. Because of its low-end spectacles, it never saw much traction .

frankincense in our record Ice Lake is Intel ’ s foremost true entrance to the CPU commercialize with the 10nm work. There are many more SKUs available and we ’ ra already seeing adequate consumption in the market across ultraportable laptops. rather of one CPU, there are 11 in Intel ’ second Ice Lake line-up, across 9W, 15W and 28W might categories. These are all designed for low-power ultraportables and other mobile devices, at least for now.


Intel ’ s appellative outline is confusing as usual. Before Intel used U suffixes to denote 15W products, and Y to denote 9W. nowadays this is relegated to a single number : the 1065G7 for model is a 15W CPU, while the 1060G7 is 9W. All 15W products get a 5 in the fourthly digit, and 9W parts get a 0. I personally preferred the function of U or Y, that was clearer for buyers quite than hiding this all-important performance indicator among a bunch together of other letters and numbers .

What has become clear this generation though, is the desegregate graphics capabilities. The G suffix tells us precisely what sort of CPU shape we ’ ra getting : G7 denotes Iris Plus with the entire 64 execution units unlocked, G4 is Iris Plus cut down to 48 EUs, and then G1 gives us UHD graphics with 32 EUs. All use Intel ’ s new Gen 11 GPU, which is one of the bigger changes to Ice Lake compared to former 14nm generations .
And it ’ s a much needed change. Since Skylake was introduced, 15W CPUs have largely been stuck with GPUs that pack only 24 execution units with an computer architecture from 2015, and that continues to be the lawsuit with 2019 ’ s 14nm refresh codenamed Comet Lake. Some 28W parts would push this astir to 48 murder units, but that was by and large the utmost you could find .

now, the floor G1 tier includes 32 EUs, so we ’ rhenium already seeing a 33 % addition to core reckon ( if you want to call murder units “ cores ” ). And the top end besides gets a bulge, but crucially you can still find 64 EU G7 graphics within a 15W ability envelope, therefore Intel is bringing a significant chute to graphics capabilities within the existing TDP, allowing it to better compete with the beefy graphics AMD provides in Ryzen Mobile .
On top of this, Gen11 graphics provide a number of architectural changes, including support for variable rate shade, adaptive synchronize, display stream compression, and a faster media encoder. This truly is the key benefit to getting Ice Lake over former generations .

There are besides significant changes on the CPU front man, thanks to an all-new CPU core in Sunny Cove. Intel is promising an 18 % IPC increase over Skylake, subscribe for AVX-512, new active tune capabilities, and a much better memory control that supports DDR4-3200 and LPDDR4X-3733 speeds .

While IPC has seen a large increase ( according to Intel ), this has been offset by lower clock speeds across the Ice Lake line. Take the flagship 15W separate that we ’ re looking at today : the Core i7-1065G7. It gets the full 64 execution unit experience, giving us all the benefits of Gen11 graphics. But it only packs four Sunny Cove CPU cores with a root clock of 1.3 GHz, a single-core turbo of 3.9 GHz and an all-core accelerate of 3.5 GHz .

This is well below what you get with Intel ’ s early current-generation CPU, Comet Lake. The top-end Comet Lake chip built on 14nm offers a bad integrated graphics, but bumps up the CPU to 6 cores, clocked at 1.1 GHz root, 4.7 GHz single-core turbo, and 4.1 GHz all core. alternatively you can get a Core i7 quad-core with a 1.8 GHz base and 4.3 GHz all-core turbo .

While these 15W parts broadly don ’ triiodothyronine rivulet at the advertised clock speeds in nourish workloads, even comparing just these rated frequencies shows a massive discrepancy. Base clocks comparing quad core to quad core are about 40 % higher for Comet Lake, although this narrows to 23 % comparing all-core turbos. But with Ice Lake merely receiving an 18 % average addition to IPC, you can already see that it is credibly going to struggle to outperform what Intel already has on 14nm in CPU workloads .
And again, this whole site with Intel having both 10nm Ice Lake and 14nm Comet Lake on the grocery store at the lapp fourth dimension as part of their 10th generation only serves to confuse customers. With Comet Lake boasting a beefy CPU and Ice Lake taking the GPU peak, even everyday Joes will have to do even more research than always before to ensure what they are getting is the right field product for their practice casing .
And with product names like Core i7-10710U and Core i7-1065G7, which bit is better and in what areas is then cloudy I can ’ t see how anyone other than a hard-core enthusiast will truly know what they are getting. I feel like unconstipated consumers know the old “ higher number is better ” trick, but with these names, that sort of deduction is impossible .

so that ’ s the baseline cognition you need about Ice Lake to kick off this performance follow-up …
today we ‘re focusing on the top-end Core i7-1065G7, a quad-core CPU with G7 graphics. This reappraisal will be discussing everything you need to know about productiveness and calculate operation, we ’ ll be comparing Ice Lake to previous 14nm parts, but gaming is something we ’ ll be tackling in a separate article .

The laptop we have for testing with Ice Lake inside is the new Razer Blade Stealth, a laptop design that we in truth like with its super streamlined metallic element design and high-end components. It besides tends to provide a in truth great examination platform – the CPU inside this beast can be configured at both its standard 15W TDP, or at a higher 25W TDP, giving us useful data for both. It besides packs dual-channel memory at the utmost LPDDR4X-3733 speeds, so we ’ ra getting the full memory bandwidth improvements of Ice Lake in this screen organization, excessively, which is ideal .

The laptop besides includes a discrete GPU, Nvidia ’ s GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q. For most tests, this GPU has been disabled so we can focus on the calculate performance of the new integrate Gen11 graphics, but in some cases it ’ s besides enabled. We have test data from an MSI Prestige 14 which packs the 6-core i7-10710U and GTX 1650 Max-Q, so we can besides get a adequate expect at whether Ice Lake or Comet Lake is better when a more knock-down discrete GPU is thrown into the photograph .

Benchmarks

We ’ re going to kick things off here as common with a expression at Cinebench R20, which gives us that all important search at multi and individual threaded performance. The results for Ice Lake and 10nm are quite disappointing but not wholly unexpected given the lower clock speeds this CPU is able to run at. The Core i7-1065G7 sits among the Core i5-10210U and Core i7-8565U towards the penetrate of the charts. These are all quad-core CPUs engage at 15W, there distinctly international relations and security network ’ triiodothyronine much to be gained here moving from 14nm to 10nm in this power envelope .

The fresh Core i7-10710U with six cores demolishes the Core i7-1065G7 in multi-threaded performance hera : the 10710U is a good 32 percentage quicker. however, the 1065G7 does very well with single-threaded performance, outperforming most other CPUs in this postpone, which bodes well for Ice Lake in other single-threaded benchmarks .
When bumping the 1065G7 up to 25W, merely then is it able to outperform the 10710U in its 15W shape, but when both chips are operating at the lapp TDP, the six-core option is even army for the liberation of rwanda superior .

Looking at clock speeds, there aren ’ t besides many surprises given our rated clock speed discussion earlier. Like all 15W CPUs, under a prolong Cinebench footrace, clock speeds are well below the maximal all-core turbo frequency then ability consumption doesn ’ t exceed 15W. The 14nm Core i5-10210U sits between 2.2 and 2.3 GHz all-core in this run, while the 10nm Core i7-1065G7 drops down to 1.8 to 1.9 GHz .

All three of these CPUs score roughly the same in this benchmark, but the 14nm chips need to be clocked around 22 percentage higher. This ends up being quite exchangeable to the difference in rated boost clocks we saw earlier, which was 23 percentage, and besides exchangeable to Intel ’ s IPC improvement claims for Ice Lake, at an 18 percentage average .

The downside is that while Ice Lake is able to do more per clock and perform arsenic good as 14nm parts, there is no substantial improvement to efficiency. This is pretty concerning for a new process, although it besides speaks volumes about what Intel has been able to do with 14nm and its continual refinements. After all, this is 10nm up against 14nm++++, and those pluses do make a modest difference with these fluid parts .

For those thinking about a desktop Ice Lake central processing unit, if we got perfect scaling with Cinebench R20 results, Intel would be able to make a 4.0 GHz 10nm CPU run like a 4.8 GHz 14nm CPU. But there are many wonder marks here : can Intel get Ice Lake running at 4.0 GHz all-core, specially over what would need to be 8 cores ? Given boost clocks for mobile parts, that seems like it might be catchy. Would it even be as effective at these frequencies ? Would it improve performance ?
We ’ ll have to wait for desktop 10nm parts to get answers to those questions but you can see why Intel is sticking with 14nm on the desktop for now .
Let ’ s look at some more benchmarks. Cinebench R15 has the 1065G7 slightly ahead of the Core i5 and Core i7 14nm models we ’ ve just been talking about, but there ’ s no significant gains to be made compared to the 10710U with its six cores : the 1065G7 is distillery 24 percentage dull. Single weave performance is very effective as we saw previously .

Handbrake is where the boys get separated from the men, as this multiple hour long benchmark in truth stresses the hanker term firm state performance of these chips. Again, when constrained to 15W, there ’ s very no advantage to CPU performance here over previous generation parts. We ’ re about 23 percentage slower than the 10710U, while the higher clocked Core i7-8565U actually outperforms the 1065G7 by a few minutes .

very like narrative with x264 encoding, although this time the 1065G7 is marginally slower than 14nm equivalents such as the Core i5-10210U. In anything multi-threaded like this there merely aren ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate many gains to be had from Intel ’ s 10nm process .

It ’ s not all bad for Ice Lake though. Single-threaded performance is very potent, and here looking at a single exemplify of Premiere ’ s Warp Stabilizer effect we can see that the 1065G7 is at least 8 percentage faster than last-gen 14nm CPUs, and 12 percentage faster than Intel ’ s lower clocked 10710U. We saw hints of that in Cinebench but here we can see the material difference, with Ice Lake shaving a minute off this workload.


What about another well result for Ice Lake ? In Adobe Photoshop ’ s Iris Blur percolate we see strong performance out of the Core i7-1065G7. This CPU is 8 percentage faster than the 10710U and 17 percentage faster than the 10510U, which is a very firm show. While this international relations and security network ’ t a single-threaded test, it ’ mho quite memory intensive given the size of the photograph we ’ ra working with, so I believe we ’ ra seeing beneficial gains from the massive improvement to memory bandwidth we get thanks to Ice Lake ’ s newfangled memory control .

But when we move second to these long term multi-threaded tests, it ’ s not well news program for Ice Lake. In this Blender benchmark run which is run on the CPU for all of these processors, the 1065G7 is slower than 14nm equivalents like the Core i7-8565U. It ’ s not massively slower, but ideally you ’ d like to see some sort of gain in the 15W might class. That is entirely provided by the six-core 10710U, which matches the performance of the 1065G7 at 25W .

7-zip continues the fib we ’ ve been showing for a while now. even though this is a light workload, it ’ randomness multi-threaded, and the 1065G7 ends up falling behind the Core i5-10210U. The margins aren ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate huge, all within unmarried digits for most of these 10nm vs 14nm quad core comparisons, but still not that impressive .

few more workloads to go, this time our mark new MATLAB benchmark which is a veridical populace usage of differential equations and fast Fourier transforms, which are common tasks people perform in this engineering tool. This workload hits merely a few threads and besides can be quite memory and hoard intensive, so with Ice Lake seeing gains in these areas, MATLAB performance is higher than early 10th-generation parts. 13 percentage gains here over 10th-gen is identical decent .

What about Adobe PDF exporting, which is another single-threaded tax ? Ice Lake performs well hera, like we ’ ve seen in other 1T workloads. 10 percentage better performance than the Core i7-10710U is a full solution and is in pipeline with what we ’ ve shown so far .

Ice Lake international relations and security network ’ t very fast in VeraCrypt decoding, matching the 8565U and amazingly falling well behind the Core i5-10210U. Comet Lake possibly has enhancements to improve accelerate AES performance that early architectures don ’ metric ton, testing farther 10th-gen CPUs will give more insights to this benchmark .

With all the CPU limited tests out of the way, let ’ s take a expression at some calculate workloads, because this is where Ice Lake will truly shine thanks to its much faster Gen11 GPU. Our fresh Premiere benchmark is a prime exercise of this. We ’ re able to take advantage of Premiere ’ sulfur hardware accelerated encode, on top of GPU accelerated effects, to deliver significant gains .
In its stock configuration with no dedicate GPU, the Core i7-1065G7 outperforms most other configurations, including the Core i5-10210U with an MX250 GPU. It besides demolishes 14nm parts : 75 % faster than the i7-10710U, and more than twice a fast as the i5-10210U, all thanks to huge GPU gains .

What ’ mho besides impressive to see is that when the GPU is kept constant, in this case the GTX 1050 Max-Q, Ice Lake is still marginally faster in this workload compared to the six-core 10710U, I think a lot of that comes down to better accelerated encoding. But overall, if Premiere is your chief workload, Ice Lake is the way to go with better Warp Stabilizer performance and better encoding performance .

When using our older Premiere benchmark, which is more GPU intensifier, gains aren ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate as significant specially compared to some of the discrete GPU options. Pairing a 10210U with an MX250 for example, is much faster, although consumes a batch more power. And Ice Lake falls behind Comet Lake with 6 cores versus 4 cores when the GTX 1650 Max-Q is held ceaseless .
We besides see huge performance gains in CompuBench Optical Flow, with a more than 2x advantage comparing Gen11 graphics to older 14nm options. When amply GPU limited like this, it ’ sulfur no surprise to see the much higher execution whole count on Ice Lake take control and deliver a large performance improvement .

like gains are available with Photoshop ’ s Smart Sharpen filter, which is besides run on the GPU. 130 % faster operation from Ice Lake compared to Comet Lake and other Skylake derivative CPUs is a huge gain, and it slightly nudges out the MX250 from Nvidia which is amazing from an integrated choice. It besides ends up handily beating AMD ’ s Ryzen Mobile offerings in this test, I suspect higher memory bandwidth to the GPU is playing a contribution there, given we precisely saw Ryzen performing well in Optical Flow .

What We Learned

All the data in, that ‘s many hours of benchmarking you barely witnessed justly there. We haven ’ metric ton seen excessively many surprises given all the information we had in the lead up to this release. We weren ’ metric ton expecting much in the region of CPU performance, but we did expect properly gains to GPU performance, and that ’ s largely what we observed .

The Core i7-1065G7 delivers roughly equivalent multi-threaded CPU performance to the Core i5-10210U. thus when comparing quad-cores on Intel ’ s 10nm and 14nm nodes, basically nothing has been gained here. Single thread operation is slightly higher, around the 10 percentage chump, but this is offset by the periodic slower multi-threaded consequence. In cosmopolitan, it ’ s fair to say performance is about even .

And it ’ s similar comparing the Core i7-1065G7 to the Whiskey Lake Core i7-8565U. There are some larger than expected gains for workloads like MATLAB and Photoshop Iris Blur, but in longer tests like Handbrake, Ice Lake actually clocks in slower. On average, the i7-1065G7 is a few percentage faster but it ’ s not a mindblowing difference and surely in these CPU limited workloads, there ’ s not much of a reason to upgrade from any of the 8th-generation parts or newer .

When you compare ice Lake to the best Intel has to offer within 15W, the Core i7-10710U smokes the Core i7-1065G7 in multi-threaded workloads, so if you want to use your ultraportable for anything intensive like video encoding, a Comet Lake six-core CPU is a better choice. At the lapp time, Ice Lake is by and large faster in single-threaded tests, so it will depend what sort of things you do with your laptop as to what central processing unit makes more sense .

The margins don ’ triiodothyronine exchange besides a lot when comparing 25W configurations, more world power does equal more performance and in this case Ice Lake is approximately 20 to 25 percentage faster in its 25W mode compared to 15W, but so is Comet Lake. If you were expecting to see notably better efficiency at these higher exponent targets, sol far that doesn ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate seem to be the encase on the fluid side .

On the other hand, Ice Lake is clearly much faster when you need GPU acceleration. In pure GPU limited situations, Ice Lake ’ sulfur unlocked Gen 11 GPU is more than twice a fast as the icky integrated GPU we ’ ve had from Skylake derivatives. And that ’ s all within the same 15W power envelope. In a blend workload like Premiere, that can lead to huge performance improvements .

overall, our early impressions on Intel ’ s Ice Lake processor are mix. From testing the fastest 15W shape available, there are some convinced takeaways : faster single-thread operation, enormously improved GPU performance – but this is spoiled by issues in other areas .
Getting no improvement to multi-threaded performance is concerning for Intel ’ s new 10nm lymph node. Considering the CPUs we ’ ve tested have all been locked to 15W, getting no performance gains from 10nm versus 14nm means we ’ re besides seeing no gains to efficiency. Ice Lake does appear to have much improved IPC, but this has been entirely offset by the CPU run at lower clock speeds. Lower clock speeds, higher IPC, lapp world power, same performance .
This handily allows Comet Lake to swoop in, offering a six-core CPU in the lapp power envelope, for significant gains to multi-threaded performance. Again, doesn ’ t lend oneself to single-thread applications where Ice Lake holds a lead, but for anything that loads up the CPU, Comet Lake is the direction to go .

Granted, we haven ’ t done any battery life testing with this newly platform as it ’ s closely impossible to get a good apples-to-apples comparison, but same operation at same office level shouldn ’ triiodothyronine translate to major improvements. If anything, gains will come from other platform advantages like changes to the way world power gate is handled, different boost technologies, more efficient memory and so on .
Getting a much faster GPU with Ice Lake is dainty, but it ’ south besides not a revolutionist upgrade given AMD has been offering this screen of performance since late 2017 with Ryzen Mobile. This is more about Intel bringing their separate up to a competitive graphics point of view. In some instances Ice Lake ’ s 64 execution whole GPU still falls behind first-gen Ryzen Mobile, depending on the baron limitations. other times, it ’ sulfur faster, depending on how much memory bandwidth is required given Ice Lake has a big advantage in that department .
Intel besides has to compete with discrete GPU offerings, including Nvidia ’ s popular MX150 and MX250, adenine well as newer, more knock-down options like the GeForce GTX 1650 Max-Q that was included with our Razer Blade Stealth test system. It depends heavily on the exact workload in wonder, but Ice Lake ’ sulfur integrated GPU international relations and security network ’ thyroxine much faster than Comet Lake with an MX250, the exception to this govern being Premiere, where a combination of factors make Ice Lake a much better option .

As it stands right now, the outright fastest hardware combination I ’ ve seen in ultraportable shape factors appears to be Intel ’ s Core i7-10710U paired with a GTX 1650 Max-Q, which you can get in MSI ’ s Prestige 14. If Razer, for exercise, had swapped out the i7-1065G7 for a i7-10710U in this latest Blade Stealth, I suspect in most workloads it would be superior, aside from some single-threaded edge cases .
While it ’ second clean that Ice Lake has a much improved integrate GPU, because it doesn ’ t bring ahead CPU performance with it, we ’ rhenium not seeing improvements over what was already possible with 14nm. OEMs have been increasingly opting for discrete GPUs in their ultraportables, and Ice Lake doesn ’ triiodothyronine do a lot to improve over these configurations. If you bought an 8th-gen laptop with an MX150, Ice Lake wo n’t be much of an upgrade. Where you will see gains is in laptops that don ’ metric ton use a discrete GPU. If an OEM decides that they just want to include one chip, then something like the Core i7-1065G7 is going to give a large calculate performance advance over read, an 8th-gen Core i7-8565U by itself .
Bottom line, it ‘s a meek begin for Intel ’ s 10nm series ascribable to a lack of efficiency gains which credibly has to do with Intel ’ s struggles at 10nm. It ‘s possible that with a 10nm revision or merely a full step forth to 7nm, this will improve significantly. interim on the other side of the fence AMD is working hard on a next-gen Ryzen Mobile separate on TSMC ’ s 7nm .

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