At the same time, Tiger Lake’s biggest performance jump is in graphics, where Intel managed to take the overall performance lead from AMD. Intel wants to sell this card as an AI and machine learning accelerator, and it has a technology called Deep Link built into the chip that will allow the iGPU and dGPU to team up on certain workloads. This is not a terribly strong debut for the Iris Xe Max. It would be rather odd if the gap between the two systems came down to CPU performance/throttling under load, but a graph of clock speeds for each chip would answer the question. It’d be interesting to see how both laptops adjusted their CPU and GPU clock rates while running identical benchmarks. It’s possible that the dGPU is either ramping up and down, or that other thermal limits in the chassis keep its overall clock rate lower. While the higher-end chips had a higher boost clock, they hit their thermal trip points much more often and had to throttle back. ![]() There were three Core M CPUs to choose from, and folks soon noticed that the lowest-end CPU sometimes ran faster than the higher-end chips. One of the reasons I suspect there might be a power or thermal issue in play here is because of what happened back when Intel launched Core M. I checked other reviews on Tiger Lake laptops, and the GPU performance on those systems was only a little slower (1-2 fps) than the whitebook. It’s also possible that Intel’s Core i7-1185G7 is more aggressive when it comes to maintaining boost clocks and runs faster in 720p for that reason. It’s possible that Dell picked less aggressive thermal and power targets than Intel did, either for the CPU, GPU, or both. Two of the three Core i7-8565U-powered machines score almost identically. This PCMag benchmark from Ice Lake’s debut makes the point. It can be assumed that these systems are designed to showcase Intel’s CPUs to their best advantage. I haven’t tested the Tiger Lake whitebook that Mag used, but it’s my understanding that these systems are both well-built and typically tuned to run well in 25W power envelopes. The penalty would have to be enormous - the Intel whitebook has a large lead in some of these tests. Let me say upfront that the answer might be something banal, like “Dell shipped the laptop with an early graphics driver,” or “A firmware update improved CPU and GPU performance by tweaking throttle points.” A more interesting possibility is that we’re seeing the impact of differences in power management and thermal targets between the Dell and the Intel whitebook, or, a performance-limiting characteristic of LPDDR4X. The discrete card has every advantage - dedicated RAM, higher core clocks, higher overall memory bandwidth - and yet it can’t win. ![]() We’re comparing two GPUs based on identical GPU cores.
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