Intel’s Tiger Lake mobile CPUs thrash Ryzen in early Geekbench benchmarks

For years Intel’s processors have seen limited performance leaps generation-to-generation, mostly thanks to the company’s inability to move away from their ageing Skylake architecture and 14nm manufacturing process.   

With Tiger Lake, Intel promises a lot, bringing AI performance further into the company’s mainstream product stack while also deliver a “double-digit CPU performance increase”. Better still, this increase isn’t coming through the use of additional cores, its coming thanks to single-threaded performance gains. 

In early Geekbench 4.4.2 tests, the single-threaded performance of Intel’s Tiger Lake i7-1165G7 quad-core processor was measured at 6737 points, revealing performance numbers which were almost 30% higher than AMD’s Ryzen 7 4800U mobile processor, which scored 5210 points. 

Single-threaded performance has traditionally been a major advantage for Intel’s processors, something which was especially true before AMD released its Ryzen series of processors. Single-threaded performance boosts can benefit all applications, making systems appear faster and more responsive. While adding more CPU cores has its benefits, single-threaded performance gains are more visible from a user experience standpoint.  

While Geekbench 4 is a benchmarking utility which heavily favours Intel’s processors, their test cases nonetheless highlight areas where AMD’s Ryzen architecture can improve. Even so, Intel’s almost 30% lead highlights that AMD’s Ryzen architecture has a lot of ground to cover before it can surpass Intel in all areas. Both Intel and AMD can offer great performance to mobile PC users, and Tiger Lake shows is that Intel still has what it takes to compete within today’s competitive x86 CPU market. The question now is when will these Tiger Lake benefits come to desktop and server processors. 

With Tiger Lake, we can expect Intel to heavily focus on the single-threaded performance of their latest processors, as this is an area where Tiger Lake is expected to be superior to AMD’s Renoir-based Ryzen Mobile processors. While Ryzen will offer user higher core counts, Intel will offer users greater single-threaded performance, competitive integrated graphics and AI compute.