Intel Core i5-L15G7 Lakefield CPU Rivals Qualcomm Snapdragon 835

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Battle of the low-power chips.

A second Intel Lakefield processor has finally popped up in the wild. Twitter user @InstLatX64 recently spotted the Core i5-L15G7 in a Geekbench 5 submission. Based on the model name alone, the Core i5-L15G7 should be a lower-specced model in contrast to the previously-tested Core i5-L16G7.

The Core i5-L15G7 chip is listed with five cores, which correspond to one powerful Sunny Cove core and four slower Tremont cores. The compute die should be on the 10nm process while the base die remains on the 22nm process. Intel will build Lakefield with Foveros, a technology that allows stacking different chips on top of each other. Lakefield should debut with TDP (thermal design power) rating between 5W and 7W.

One of the first Lakefield chips appeared with a boost clock in the 3.1 GHz range. Subsequently, the Core i5-L16G7 showed up with a 1.4 GHz base and 1.75 GHz boost clock. Geekbench 5 seemingly detects the Core i5-L15G7 with a 1.38 GHz base clock. However, the Lakefield part was running as high as 2.95 GHz during the benchmark. The logical deduction is that the reported clock speeds are for the Sunny Cove core rather than the Tremont ones.

Digging deeper into the Geekbench 5 report reveals the Core i5-L15G7's cache configuration, which isn't always visible in the submission itself. The Core i5-L15G7 seems to have 1.5MB of L2 cache and 4MB of L3 cache.

The plan behind Lakefield is to combine performance with power efficiency into a single package, similar to Arm's big.LITTLE architecture. Lakefield goes neck-to-neck against Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors.

The Snapdragon 835, which powers the Asus NovaGo TP370QL, is equipped with eight Kryo 280 cores, split into two groups of 2.6 GHz and 1.9 GHz. The device scores 355 points in the single-core test and 1,533 points in the multi-core test. In single-core workloads, it's evident that the Core i5-L15G7 is far superior. With a single-core score of 725 points, Intel's Lakefield chip delivers up to 104.2% higher single-core performance than the Snapdragon 835. Multi-core workloads are another story though. The Core i5-L15G7 scored 1,566 points, so it's only 2.2% faster.

However, the Core i5-L15G7's multi-threaded performance is no match for Qualcomm's more recent offerings, such as the Snapdragon 8cx that's inside the Samsung Galaxy Book S. For reference, the Snapdragon 8cx rocks eight Kryo 495 cores, four clocked at 2.84 GHz and the remaining at 1.8 GHz. The Samsung Galaxy Book S puts up single-core and multi-core scores of 703 points and 2,770 points. While the Core i5-L15G7 maintains 3.1% single-core lead over the Snapdragon 8cx, Qualcomm's chip ultimately offers up to 76.9% higher performance in multi-threaded workloads.

Given that Lakefield is Intel's first generation of Foveros-based chips, the performance doesn't look too bad. The leaked Core i5-L15G7 is unreleased silicon after all, hence Intel still could probably tweak the chip for more performance. Furthermore, Geekbench 5 has often been criticized for its applicability as a benchmarking tool on a whole. We'll just have to wait for a proper evaluation of the Lakefield devices that drop this holiday season.
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