Intel made another marketing blunder during its Computex 2021 Keynote. Comparing its newly launched Tiger Lake-U refresh to AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800U APU, it was demonstrated that the latter performs 15-30% better than the latter, but there’s a catch. The Core i7-1195G7 draws nearly twice as much power as the stock TDP rating of the Cezanne SoC. While the Ryzen 5000U processors have a TDP of just 15W, the competing Tiger Lake-U lineup comes with a TDP of 28W, with some vendors expected to increase it to 35W in premium designs.
Update: In addition to the TDP, the Ryzen 7 5800U is paired with standard DDR4-3200 memory while the Intel sample is paired with the more faster and efficient LPDDR4x-4267 kit (both 8GB x2).
Despite drawing nearly twice as much power as the 5800U, the Core i7-1195G7 was generally just 14-25% faster in SYSMark 25, with unnamed benchmarks in “Productivity Workflow” and “Collaboration and Productivity Workflow” being 15% and 41% faster, respectively.
The Core i7-1195G7 is essentially a higher clocked 1185G7 with a single-core boost clock of 5GHz and an accompanying voltage of 1.4v (vs 1.35v on the 1185G7). Similarly, the Core i5-1155G7 features a boost clock of 4.5GHz, compared to 4.4GHz on the 1145G7. Once again, this 100MHz gain comes at the cost of increased voltage, and thereby an increased power draw.
The gaming benchmarks look more promising, but once again, we’re comparing a 15W part to a 28W part. Gaming is still heavily determined by single-threaded performance and boost clocks, and such, it’ll be interesting to see how the two architectures perform with an equalized TDP.