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

We’re going to reserve final judgement on Ice Lake and the 10th Gen Core i7-1065G7 until we get our hands on final, retail-ready products and see how it behaves when it reaches consumers, not only in terms of performance, but battery life and connectivity as well. There are some interesting things we can take-away from today’s endeavor, however.


The IPC and single-thread performance enhancements Intel disclosed in regard to Sunny Cove (the microarchitecture at the heart of Ice Lake) are the real deal. Of course, they have been a long time coming with all that Intel has had to contend with getting a next-gen architecture based on its 10nm process out the door, but in the end the Core i7-1065G7 lead in all of the single-threaded testing. Versus the previous-gen Whisky Lake based Core i7-8565U, multi-threaded performance was better across the board as well. The Ryzen 7 3700U eeked out a couple of MT victories versus the Core i7-1065G7, however, at least when it was configured to run with 15W TDP.

Ice Lake’s support for DL Boost also seems like it’ll pay big dividends as AI-enabled software eventually begins to arrive. Throughput and latency were the best of the group, by far, according to the AIXPRT benchmarks.

The Gen 11 Iris Plus graphics engine in the Core i7-1065G7 is a massive upgrade over Intel’s previous-gen as well. When running in its 25W mode, the Core i7-1065G7’s Iris Plus graphics offers roughly 2x the performance of the Intel UHD 620 and competed favorably with the Vega 10 graphics in the Ryzen CPU. And we suspect Intel will be able to wring even more performance from its new GPU as its software and drivers are further tuned and optimized. Intel scoring some wins over AMD’s current top-end, on-processor graphics solution is a big deal.


The rest of the initial Ice Lake line-up being announced today is outlined in the table above. The Core i7-1065G7 isn’t the king of the hill, but it does reside near the top, behind only the 28W Core i7-1068G7. It's too early to draw any conclusions as to how Ice Lake will shake up the mobile landscape, but our initial looks here paints a nice picture and we look forward to getting our hands on retail-ready notebooks as they begin to roll out in the weeks and months ahead.

Improved Single And Multi-Thread Performance Much Faster Gen 11 Graphics Engine DL Boost Increases AI Performance	Not Available Just Yet Vega 10 Still (Mostly) Faster In Actual Games