Intel Tiger Lake Y processor posts absurd UserBenchmark scores; Core i9-8950HK single-core performance on a 5 W chip?

Intel has not even released its Comet Lake U or Ice Lake series yet, but a mysterious Tiger Lake Y series CPU has already appeared on UserBenchmark. A leaked Intel roadmap implies that Tiger Lake Y will feature 10 nm quad-core CPUs, which is not all that surprising. However, as you may have twigged from its Y branding, Tiger Lake Y will be more energy efficient than other Core series chipsets. Intel will reportedly restrict Tiger Lake Y to just 5 W, which is 10 W lower than most U series processors.

UserBenchmark reports that the CPU, named Intel 0000, will support Hyper-Threading, allowing it to execute up to 8 threads simultaneously. Moreover, the processor will have a 1.2 GHz base clock, with it averaging a 2.9 GHz turbo. A quad-core 5 W processor that can reach 2.9 GHz does not sound that exciting but performed surprisingly well in UserBenchmark with its single-core performance being around 11% faster than the Core i7-8750H. The Tiger Lake Y chip is 3% faster than the Core i7-8750H in the quad-core benchmark too, although the hexa-core CPU is predictably a lot quicker in multi-core work.

The Intel 0000 is around 25% faster than the Ryzen 7 3750H in single and quad-core tasks, with it also edging the 35 W processor by 3% in the multi-core benchmark. Essentially, the Tiger Lake Y chip is as fast as the Core i9-8950HK in single-core tasks and the Core i7-8850H in quad-core work according to UserBenchmark.

The benchmark also claims that Windows throttled the CPU's performance to 83%, so these results are likely to be worse than what this Tiger Lake Y chip could manage. It is worth keeping in mind that this will be an engineering sample too, which generally perform worse than their retail counterparts. We doubt that these results scale linearly, so we cannot extrapolate what the CPU could achieve at 100% by upscaling the results by 17%. Elsewhere, UserBenchmark confirms that Tiger Lake will come with Gen12 Intel UHD Graphics. These tests were run on the 26.20.100.7004 driver if that means anything to anyone. Keep your eyes peeled for Tiger Lake Y, as it could be bringing a lot of CPU and graphics performance to a fanless PC or laptop near you.