Tiger Lake-H has put Intel back on track in its fight against AMD's Zen series

AMD rocked the world of gaming laptops last year when it introduced its Zen 2 series of H-series CPUs. The 7 nm processors would represent a huge leap from the original Zen series to the point where they could allow even 14-inch form factors to outperform larger 15.6-inch and 17.3-inch Intel Coffee Lake-H or Comet Lake-H systems. It wasn't a good look for Intel when a regular Ryzen 7 4800H could rival the significantly pricier Core i9-9880H or i9-10880H.

With 11th gen Tiger Lake-H laptops hitting store shelves this month, Intel finally has a proper answer to the seemingly uncontested Zen 2 and Zen 3 series. Our first test models equipped with the 11th gen Core i7-11800H are returning multi-thread performance numbers that are 40 to 50 percent faster than the 10th gen i7-10875H. Meanwhile, single-thread gains are smaller but still notable at about 20 percent.

The gen-to-gen upticks over Intel's last generation CPUs are enough to put the i7-11800H neck-to-neck with the latest AMD Zen 3 Ryzen 9 5900HS or 5900HX. Our table below compares the average scores of all laptops in our database equipped with the associated CPUs to show that the i7-11800H is within just a few percentage points of the aforementioned Ryzen CPUs in most cases.

We've yet to test many laptops with the Core i9-11950H or i9-11980HK which should offer even faster performance than the i7-11800H at least on paper.

Outside of raw performance, the newer Intel CPUs include support for both Thunderbolt 4 and PCIe 4 compared to only PCIe 3 and no Thunderbolt at all of the AMD CPUs. Such high-end features won't matter very much to the majority of users, but they certainly give enthusiasts more reasons to skip AMD this time around.