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Is that a tiger, or a cheetah?

AMD's Ryzen 4700U and 4800U are just barely making their ways into notebooks, but excitement is high, and performance expectations are steep thanks to their 8-core designs and integrated AMD Radeon graphics. However, Intel is also making good strides in the mobile space, as the Tiger Lake-U benchmarks have also shown promising performance. In the latest leak, the Intel Tiger Lake-U Core i7-1165G7 is spotted undergoing the 3D Mark Performance test, where it quite shockingly surpassed the R7 4800U's performance. The information comes courtesy of hardware detective @_Rogame, who dug up the 3DMark entry from 3DMark's public databases.

In the test, the Core i7-1165G7 chip blasted to a physics score of 11879 points, along with an impressive graphics score of 6912 points. For comparison, @_Rogame noted that the R7 4800U puts down 11917 points in the physics score, which is practically identical but lags behind in graphics at 6121 points.

Intel Core i7-1165G7 AMD Ryzen R7 4800U

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3DMark Physics 11,879* 11,917*
3DMark Graphics 6,912* 6,121*
* Performance numbers not confirmed by Tom's Hardware.

The two CPU-based scores (physics) are nearly identical, which is very impressive considering the AMD chip has twice the number of cores. This suggests Intel has achieved a massive increase in IPC (instructions per clock) on the Tiger Lake-U generation of processors thanks to the new microarchitecture.

There is one thing that's important to note: 3DMark 11 is, at this point, is nearly ten years old, and was never coded to handle the high core counts of today's processors properly. For example, doing a quick test of a Core i9-9900K with all eight cores vs. the same chip with only four cores enabled, 3DMark 11 Performance shows a Physics score of 19,611 vs. 13,687, meaning doubling the core and thread count only improved performance by 43%. CPU performance based on today's applications may have a larger performance delta.

The graphics score, on the other hand, does make more sense. Intel is investing heavily in its Xe graphics. Although discrete Xe graphics cards technically aren't aimed at the gaming or consumer market yet, that won't stop its derivatives from putting down significantly better figures than Intel's previous attempts at integrated graphics. Plus, AMD's Renoir GPU isn't significantly changed over the previous Vega 11 Graphics, giving Intel even more opportunity to close the gap.

For the time being, we wouldn't read too much into this benchmark. It does show promising performance, and although we have no doubt that Tiger Lake will offer much-improved performance figures over its Ice Lake predecessors, information before launch should always be taken with a grain of salt.
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