10 nm Intel Tiger Lake-U CPU spotted inside a Microsoft Surface Laptop, performs better than the Ryzen 7 4700U

Intel’s third gen 10 nm mobility CPUs codenamed Tiger Lake should launch later this year with select Project Athena laptops. Tiger Lake will be marketed as a competitor for AMD’s freshly released Ryzen 4000 APUs, and wil include upgrades such as Gen 12 Xe iGPUs with 12-bit HEVC hardware decoding plus support for  PCIe 4.0, Thunderbolt 4 and LPDDR5 RAM. Some early tests spotted in the 3DMark database by twitter user _rogame suggest that the performance is on par with AMD’s Renoir APUs, which is encouraging for Intel, as the latest Comet Lake-H laptop CPUs do not really threaten AMD’s dominance in the mid-range sector currently.

_rogame spotted the 2.7 GHz Tiger Lake-U model scoring 8,412 points for the Physics test and 5,540 points for the graphics test. Now, the database actually shows default and boost clocks close to 1.2 GHz, but _rogame is confident that this is just an erroneous report from 3DMark. The Tiger Lake-U CPU should have the default clock set to 2.7 GHz and the boost clock at 4.3 GHz. Since these are early tests and Intel will most likely make further tweaks to cooling and bios, this Tiger Lake-U processor is expected to perform somewhere in between AMD’s Ryzen 7 4700U and 4800U models, while the iGPU may end up 10 to 20% faster than that of the Ryzen 7 4800U, even though it currently is a tad slower based on the test scores.

An interesting detail noted by _rogame points to the possibility of Microsoft launching Surface Laptop models powered by Tiger Lake-U chips. This was deduced from the fact that the laptop used for the 3DMark test integrates an SSD model that is found only on Surface laptops. Earlier tests also showed all-AMD Surface laptops, so Microsoft is probably looking to diversify specs as much as possible.