Intel Core i7 1165G7 "Tiger Lake" Linux Performance With The Dell XPS 13 9310

For helping to decipher all of the dozens of different benchmarks in this article, here are some additional geometric means broken down by application area / focus.

For the AV1 workloads consisting of dav1d for AV1 decoding, SVT-AV1 for AV1 encoding, and AVIFENC for AVIF image encoding, the Core i7 1165G7 nearly matched the Ryzen 5 4500U and a 26% improvement over Ice Lake.

When looking at the code compilation performance from the i7-1065G7 to i7-1165G7 was a 34% improvement from Ice Lake with the Linux kernel, FFmpeg, and Build2 tests. But the Ryzen 5 4500U with its six physical cores was faster.

Here is a look at the "creator" performance using YafaRay, LuxCore, OCRMyPDF, x265, dav1d, SVT-AV1, AVIFENC, MP3 encoding, FLAC encoding, GraphicsMagick, LibRAW, WebP, RawTherapee, Hugin, Darktable. GEGL, Open Image Denoise, OpenVKL, NeatBench, ASTCENC, and eSpeak-NG as a range of workloads from audio/video encoding to image creation/editing and more. In this case the geometric mean improved by 13% from Ice Lake to Tiger Lake.

Or if you do just a lot of imaging work with your laptop(s), the performance of GraphicsMagick, LibRAW, RawTherapee, Hugin, Darktable, GEGL, and AVIF encoding went up by 12% from Ice Lake to Tiger Lake or 29% faster than the Whiskey Lake Dell XPS.

The machine learning performance does much better with Tiger Lake as measured by MNN, NCNN, Caffe, AI Benchmark, and TensorFlow-Lit with a 27% boost over Ice Lake, but still behind Renoir.

If just looking at Intel's own software packages within the oneAPI collection by using Embree, Open Image Denoise, and OpenVKL, the Core i7 1165G7 is 28% faster over the 1065G7 and faster than the Ryzen 7 4700U. But obviously that's because the Intel software packages are, well, tuned for Intel's microarchitectures.

So there are some healthy improvements to find with the Core i7 1165G7, but in many cases that still puts this high-end Tiger Lake notebook CPU behind the Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4700U. Or in some select cases of lightly-loaded, single-threaded workloads like audio encoding or some browser benchmarks the performance wound up being worse off than Ice Lake. The context switching performance was also slower on Tiger Lake than Ice Lake. It would be interesting to see how it goes against the Ryzen 4800 series but unfortunately lack of hardware access at the moment and even in most cases the Ryzen 5 4500U with six physical cores was performing faster on Ubuntu Linux than the more expensive Dell XPS 13 9310.

The most exciting area of performance out of the Core i7 1165G7 was the Xe Graphics (Gen12) delivering significant uplift over Gen11 with Ice Lake and obviously incredible compared to the very common Gen9 graphics. Many more Xe Graphics tests both of OpenGL/Vulkan graphics performance as well as Vulkan compute workloads will be coming in follow-up articles on Phoronix.

Additionally, more Dell XPS 13 / Core i7 1165G7 Linux benchmarks exploring other workloads and different distribution/kernel combinations and more will also be coming. If you enjoy the daily Linux hardware benchmarking on Phoronix especially with articles like these where there are hardware expenditures involved for delivering Linux performance numbers, consider showing your support by joining Phoronix Premium. Thanks and now back to more benchmarking.

UPDATE: Additional benchmarks and information within Further Exploring The Intel Tiger Lake Core i7-1165G7 Performance On Ubuntu Linux.