Intel Tiger Lake Xe Gen12 iGPU in unnamed Lenovo laptop puts up promising show against NVIDIA GeForce MX350 in Geekbench OpenCL test

We've known from leaked benchmarks and from our own sources that Tiger Lake's Xe Gen12 iGPU is shaping up to be a good competitor to AMD's Radeon RX Vega 8. Recently, a new Geekbench 4 OpenCL score has emerged that puts Tiger Lake right on par with an NVIDIA GeForce MX350. We also have another Geekbench 4 OpenCL comparison between a Tiger Lake 96 Execution Unit (EU) Core i7-1165G7 and an 80 EU Core i5-1135G7, so let's check out both of them.

Firstly, let's take a look at the OpenCL compute performance numbers between Tiger Lake Xe Gen12 and the GeForce MX350. Unearthed by @_rogame, we see two Lenovo laptops pitted against each other in this comparison. The first Lenovo model is powered by a Core i7-1165G7, which features a 96 EU Xe iGPU while the other Lenovo notebook is powered by the Ice Lake Core i7-1065G7 and an NVIDIA MX350 dGPU.

The Tiger Lake Xe Gen12 iGPU scores 59,845 points against the MX350's 59,828 points in this test. While the scores are pretty much on par, the Xe seems to perform well in certain sub-benchmarks in the OpenCL test compared to the MX350. For an overall package TDP of 28 W, this Tiger Lake chip surely is able to take on the the discrete MX350 that is available in both 15 and 25 W configurations. 

In another comparison spotted by @TUM_APISAK in the same OpenCL benchmark, we get an idea of the kind of performance difference that can be expected between a 96 EU Core i7-1165G7 and an 80 EU Core i5-1135G7. Here, the Core i5-1135G7 manages to score 51,741 points, which translates to about 13.5% lower performance compared to that of the Core i7.

These results, though still early benchmarks, are an indication that Intel is looking to push iGPU prowess in laptops more than CPU power. Tiger Lake should be able to offer enough performance to enable 1080p 60 fps gaming in less-demanding eSports titles while being able to reduce the thermal and power overhead of having an additional dGPU.

What remains to be seen is how well would a Tiger Lake Xe iGPU augur for battery life compared to a discrete low-power MX series combination under load.