Intel's Tiger Lake-U Iris Xe iGPU gets beefy specs, but disappoints in latest SiSoft Sandra benchmarks

Intel is almost ready to release the new Tiger Lake-U mobility processors that are supposed to be the answer for AMD’s Ryzen 4000U APUs. These Intel CPUs will include the highly-anticipated Xe iGPUs based on the same cores integrated in the upcoming DG1 discrete GPUs releasing later this year. Intel already hyped things up with the video that showed an ultrabook capable of hitting more than 30 fps constantly while running Battlefield V at 1080p HQ settings, but the exact specs were not unveiled back then. A more recent SiSoft Sandra benchmark spotted by Twitter user TUM_APISAK could offer some additional insights in this regard.

According to the new SiSoft Sandra database entry, Intel will be keeping the Iris branding for the Xe iGPU and it looks like this Gen 12 mobility core will pack the same 96 execution units with 768 shading units from the DG1 discrete GPUs. Even better, the core clocks are running at 1.3 GHz, and the allocated system memory appears to be set at 6.38 GB.

However, the benchmark scores are surprisingly low, suggesting that this is still an early sample that needs to be further optimized. Despite its impressive specs, the Iris Xe iGPU scores are quite disappointing, lagging behind the AMD Vega 8 cores and even the older Intel HD Graphics 620 models. Of course, Sisoft Sandra is not considered to be the GPU benchmark of choice, so we might want to wait for more elaborate 3DMark results.