A Look At The Per-Clock Performance / Peak Frequencies With The Intel Core i7-1065G7 Ice Lake

Following this week's Intel Core i7-1065G7 Ice Lake Linux benchmarks there was some questions and speculations about the per-clock performance of this long-awaited Intel microarchitecture update. Here is some additional data shedding light on the clock frequencies under load and ultimately how the per-clock performance compares to the common Intel previous-generation mobile CPUs.

The Core i7-1065G7 features a 1.3GHz base frequency and 3.9GHz turbo frequency, well below the i7-8550U clock frequencies of 1.80GHz and 4.0GHz for the i7-8550U or 1.8GHz and 1.6GHz of the i7-8565U processors, the two other mobile processors compared to in this week's Linux benchmarks. But thanks to superior per-clock performance, the Ice Lake CPU offered significant raw performance and performance-per-Watt gains over these earlier processors.

As some follow-up benchmarks, I repeated some benchmarks between the Core i7-1065G7 Icelake and Core i7-8550U Kabylake-R. During this round of testing, the Phoronix Test Suite was monitoring the peak CPU frequency achieved each second throughout the automated benchmarking process (simply a matter of setting the MONITOR=cpu.peak-freq environment variable with PTS) for seeing how high of clock speeds were being achieved on each of these Dell XPS notebooks during the benchmarking process. Additionally, the CPU/system temperatures and power consumption were also being polled for those wishing to go through the numbers further.

So complementing the raw results is a look at the peak CPU frequency across any of the four cores at a given point and time. As well, a basic "perf-per-MHz" metric for each result by averaging out the peak CPU frequency achieved throughout each particular benchmark. So for those that have been debating the per-clock performance in our forums, Reddit, Twitter, etc, hopefully you find these complementary metrics useful.