Intel 10nm Ice Lake Benchmarks: 10th Gen Core i7 Performance Explored

Test System Configuration Notes: We compared the performance of the Intel Ice Lake-based software development system to a couple of high-end retail notebooks, one based on Intel's Whisky Lake 8th Gen Core processor and another featuring and AMD Ryzen 7 3700U -- the fastest we could find with on-processor Vega 10 graphics. All of the Ryzen 7 3750H-based systems available featured discrete graphics.


The Whisky Lake-system was an HP Spectre X360 13.3", packing a Core i7-8565U, 16GB of RAM, and an Intel SSD 760P NVMe SSD. The Ryzen-based system was a Lenovo T495, powered by a Ryzen 7 3700U, 16GB of RAM, and a WD SN720 NVMe SSD. We should note that the memory in the Ryzen system was configured in dual-channel mode, but it ran at only DDR4-1866. Faster memory would boost graphics performance, but we were not able to alter the speed in this notebook -- the option isn't available with most notebooks. Both machines were fully updated with the latest drivers, BIOS, firmware, and Windows Updates available as of July 29, 2019.  The full breakdown on the Intel software development system's specifications is listed below.

The Test Systems Intel and AMD - Head To Head

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2020 Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with the latest version of SiSoftware's SANDRA 2020, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in sub-system tests that partially comprise the suite with the Core i7-1065G7 (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Cache and Memory, and Memory Bandwidth). All of the scores reported below were taken with the CPU running in both 15W and 25W TDP modes, with 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM running at 3,733MHz, in dual-channel mode.

Geekbench Synthetic CPU Testing

In the GeekBench test, we're stressing only the CPU cores in a system (not graphics or GPU architecture), with both single and multi-threaded workloads. The tests are comprised of encryption processing, image compression, HTML5 parsing, physics calculations and other general purpose compute processing workloads.


Geekbench is comprised of many short, bursty workloads, so the higher TDP of the 25W Core i7-1065G7 configuration doesn't offer any help. Still, Intel's latest mobile processor is able to take the lead by a sizable margin in both the single and multi-threaded tests.

PCMark 10 System Level Benchmark

Next, up we have some full-system testing with PCMark. We're reporting all test results from the PCMark 10 benchmark suite, including the Essentials, Productivity, Digital Content Creation and and total PCMark score. The Essentials test covers workloads like web browsing, video conferencing and app start-up times, while Productivity tests everyday office apps from spreadsheets to word processing. Finally, the Digital Content Creation test evaluates performance of a machine with respect to photo and video editing, as well as rendering and visualization.


The 25W Core i7-1065G7 jumps out into the pole position in PCMark 10 as well, followed by the 15W configuration. This previous-gen Intel system is able to outpace the Ryzen 7 3700U, but trails Ice Lake by a relatively large margin in overall performance, mostly due to Ice Lake's superior Essentials and Digital Content Creation scores.