Intel Core i7-1065G7 Ice Lake Linux Performance Benchmarks

Recently I picked up a Dell XPS 7390 Core i7 Ice Lake laptop for finally testing this Intel 10nm+ processor under Linux. I have delivered some results so far like the Windows vs. Linux OpenGL/Vulkan performance and the Spectre impact with Ice Lake while this article is the first of several really drilling down on the CPU performance. In this article are benchmarks showing how the Core i7-1065G7 compares in raw performance and performance-per-Watt to the earlier Core i7-8565U (Whiskey Lake) and Core i7-8550U (Kabylake-R) processors.

The Dell XPS 7390 / Core i7-1065G7 continues working out well under Linux as noted in the earlier article with just the potential caveats of needing to switch the storage setting in the firmware over to AHCI mode and on some distributions needing to boot with the intel_lpss_pci driver black-listed. There is also the caveat of Ice Lake Thunderbolt support not in the mainline kernel until Linux 5.4, but at least for Ubuntu 19.10 Canonical has ended up back-porting it to Linux 5.3, but I haven't seen any other major distributions do the same yet. But besides those few blemishes on modern Linux distributions you should be in good shape for the new Dell XPS / Ice Lake.

In this article is an extensive look at the performance of the Dell XPS 7390 with the Core i7-1065G7 Ice Lake processor compared to the previous-generation Dell XPS models with the Core i7 Whiskey Lake and Kaby Lake processors. Those targets were used for comparison since having both of those Dell XPS models after previously purchasing them for Linux testing as well. Unfortunately I don't have any Intel Comet Lake laptops for testing nor any of the latest AMD Ryzen laptops either, thus for this article just looking at how the Ice Lake Linux performance compares to Whiskey and Kaby.

All three of these Core i7 mobile CPUs are quad-core plus Hyper Threading. For a look at how these three Intel mobile CPUs compare: