Intel Core Ultra 7 165H vs Intel Core i7-1165G7 vs Intel Core Ultra 7 155H

Intel Core Ultra 7 165H

The Intel Core Ultra 7 165H is a high-end laptop processor of the Meteor Lake series. This 1st Gen Core Ultra chip has come to replace 13th generation Core chips; it has 16 cores (6 + 8 + 2) and 22 threads at its disposal. The 16 cores are comprised of 6 HT-enabled Performance cores running at up to 5.0 GHz and 10 Efficient cores (8 main cores plus 2 extra ones found in the Low Power Island) running at up to 3.8 GHz. Two of the 10 E-cores are located in the Low Power Island.

The 8-core Arc GPU, just out of the oven, serves as the integrated graphics adapter - this runs at up to 2.30 GHz - and there is a bevy of other brand-new technologies on offer as well, including the integrated AI Boost NPU with two Gen 3 engines for hardware AI workload acceleration.

Architecture and Features

With Meteor Lake, Intel intends to deliver higher CPU performance, higher GPU performance and at the same time, longer battery life than what Raptor Lake chips were capable of. The company also wants a large piece of the AI cake and is working with Microsoft and other partners to make that happen. As a result, Windows Defender is now AI-enabled, meaning it can use the Intel NPU to take some of the load off the main CPU cores. We also get this new Intel Device Discovery technology that is designed to give us a better hardware-based remote laptop management than ever before; and, to make things even better, Intel now offers a dedicated Arc Pro graphics driver for workstations.

This generation of Intel Core processors features Redwood architecture P-cores and Crestmont architecture E-cores. Both come with architectural improvements over Raptor Cove and Gracemont respectively for slightly higher performance-per-clock figures; the interesting thing is that of the 10 E-cores, two are actually a separate cluster located on what Intel calls a "Low Power Island". Essentially, the latter is an SoC within an SoC that can stay active while most other parts of the chip are temporarily switched off to save power. The low-power E-cores run at up to 2.5 GHz. Intel hopes this approach will let it deliver unprecedentedly low power consumption figures when under low load, boosting battery life of laptops and tablets powered by Meteor Lake.

To build Meteor Lake processors, Intel uses the Foveros technology (stacking several chips on top of each other). This is a cost-cutting measure more than anything else, as manufacturing several small dies on several different processes is so much cheaper than making a huge single die and hoping that there are no defects in it that will require disabling some parts of it.

Elsewhere, the Core Ultra 7 165H comes with 24 MB of L3 cache and a very healthy number of PCIe 5 and PCIe 4 lanes for NVMe SSD speeds up to 15.7 GB/s. vPro Enterprise and business-centric features such as the Remote Platform Erase are onboard as well. It supports RAM running at up to 7467 MHz (DDR5-5600, LPDDR5-7467, LPDDR5x-7467, to be specific - which is about as good as what 8040 series Ryzen chips have). Naturally, the chip also features built-in Thunderbolt 4 support and Intel CNVi Wi-Fi support; fascinatingly enough, Intel chose to keep native SATA III support that AMD had removed from its Ryzen processors quite a while ago.

The 165H is compatible with 64-bit Windows 10, 64-bit Windows 11 and with many Linux distros.

Performance

If one chooses to trust the official Intel performance data, then the 165H is about as fast as the Ryzen 9 6900HX (Zen 3 Plus, 8 cores, 16 threads, up to 4.9 GHz), as far as multi-thread benchmark scores are concerned. This isn't a ground-breaking result but let's just wait for our in-house testing results instead of jumping to conclusions.

Either way, real-world performance of the chip may vary significantly depending on how high the CPU power limits are and how competent the cooling solution of the system is.

Graphics

The 8-core Arc GPU running at up to 2.30 GHz is slated to be a proper alternative to the mighty Radeon 780M. The thing is almost as fast as the GTX 1650 (Laptop) and the RTX 2050 (Laptop) to represent some seriously solid performance gains over aging Xe-series integrated GPUs. If one chooses to take Intel's word for it, that is.

A proper DX12 Ultimate graphics adapter, the Arc is no stranger to ray tracing and other modern technologies including AI frame generation (XeSS). It will let you connect up to four SUHD 4320p monitors and it will both HW-encode and HW-encode the most widely used video codecs including AVC, HEVC and AV1 in a fast and efficient manner.

Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are, how competent the cooling solution of your system is, how fast the RAM of your system is. The latter is really important; Intel stresses that for the Arc to deliver the best results possible, multi-channel RAM configuration is a must.

Power consumption

This mighty Core Ultra 7 series processor has a Base power consumption of 28 W, while its Turbo power consumption is not supposed to exceed 115 W. A powerful cooling solution is a must for any system powered by this chip.

The 165H is comprised of five small chips ("tiles") that are connected using Intel's Foveros technology. The tile containing main CPU cores is produced on the fairly modern 7 nm Intel process marketed as Intel 4 while most other tiles (the iGPU, the I/O die, ...) are built with TSMC's N5 and N6 processes. The base tile is built with the old Intel 22FFL process.

Intel Core i7-1165G7

The Intel Core i7-1165G7 is an upper mid-range, quad-core SoC designed for use in ultra-thin laptops. The Tiger Lake-UP3 processor was unveiled in September 2020; its Hyper-Threading-enabled Willow Cove CPU cores run at 2.8 GHz (base clock speed @ 28 W TDP) to 4.7 GHz (single-core Boost frequency). The all-core Boost frequency sits at 4.1 GHz. This i7 was the second-fastest CPU of TGL-UP3 line-up when Intel initially launched the series in 2020.

The i7 is ever-so-slightly inferior to Intel Core i7-1185G7 in that vPro support is nowhere to be found, the clock speeds are lower, and the iGPU's clock speed is a little lower as well.

Architecture

A sizeable performance-per-MHz boost is one of the many benefits of Tiger Lake generation compared to the older Ice Lake and Comet Lake product families. Core i7-1165G7 is compatible with dual-channel DDR4-3200 or quad-channel LPDDR4x-4267 RAM; Intel recommends using no more than 64 GB, for reference. The processor also supports PCI-Express 4.0 (4 lanes) and is capable of HW-accelerating certain AI workloads. Thunderbolt 4, USB 4 and Wi-Fi 6 support is partially baked into the chip. Four PCI-Express 4.0 lanes allow for read/write rates of up to 7.9 GB/s, provided a suitably fast NVMe SSD is used.

The i7 is built with the third-gen 10 nm Intel process marketed as SuperFin that is supposedly comparable to TSMC's 7 nm process, the one Ryzen 4000 and Ryzen 5000 series processors are manufactured on. Both the CPU cores and the iGPU have access to 12 MB of L3 cache. The SoC is supposed to be soldered straight on to the motherboard (BGA1449 socket interface); it is thus anything but user-replaceable.

Performance

The average i7-1165G7 in our database is just as fast as Intel's Core i5-10200H and Core i7-10810U are, as far as multi-thread benchmark scores are concerned. The chip is brave enough to come dangerously close to the noticeably costlier i7-1195G7 while unfortunately not quite reaching the high bar set by the Ryzen 3 5300U. That being said, it's a very decent CPU that will have no trouble chewing through light video editing and 3D rendering jobs on the go with a bit of gaming possible as well, as of early 2022.

Thanks to its decent cooling solution and a long-term CPU power limit of 40 W, the Schenker Vision 15 is among the fastest laptops built around the 1165G7 that we know of. It can be more than 60% faster in CPU-bound workloads than the slowest system featuring the same chip in our database, as of August 2023.

Graphics

The Iris Xe Graphics G7 (96 EUs) is based on Intel's Generation 12 architecture. It is a lot faster than the older Iris Plus G7 (Ice Lake) and UHD Graphics 620 (Comet Lake) solutions. The Xe has 96 Execution Units running at 400 MHz to 1,300 MHz, in the case of this Core i7.

This graphics adapter can drive up to 4 monitors in resolutions as high as SUHD 4320p@60 simultaneously, and the built-in video decoder is AV1-friendly. It will happily decode most other video codecs including HEVC, AVC, VP9, MPEG-2 and so on, too.

The Xe will let you play most games at 1080p / Low. It's nearly as fast as NVIDIA's GeForce MX350, surpassing anything we have seen from AMD's integrated graphics thus far. It is paramount that fast RAM is used as the Xe has no VRAM of its own. The other prerequisites for decent 3D performance are decently high Power Limits and a competent cooling solution.

Power consumption

The i7-1165G7 has a default TDP of 12 W to 28 W, the expectation being that laptop makers will go for a higher value to get higher clock speeds and thus better performance. Either way, these values are too high to allow for passively cooled designs.

The i7 is built with Intel's third-generation 10 nm process marketed as SuperFin for decent, as of mid 2022, energy efficiency.

Intel Core Ultra 7 155H

The Intel Core Ultra 7 155H is a high-end laptop processor of the Meteor Lake series that has 16 cores (6 + 8 + 2) and 22 threads at its disposal. This 1st Gen Core Ultra chip has come to replace 13th generation Core chips; its 16 cores are comprised of 6 HT-enabled Performance cores running at up to 4.8 GHz and 10 Efficient cores (8 main cores plus 2 extra ones found in the Low Power Island) running at up to 3.8 GHz.

The 8-core Arc GPU, just out of the oven, serves as the integrated graphics adapter - this runs at up to 2.30 GHz - and there is a bevy of other brand-new technologies on offer as well, including the integrated AI Boost NPU with two Gen 3 engines for hardware AI workload acceleration.

Architecture and Features

With Meteor Lake, Intel intends to deliver higher CPU performance, higher GPU performance and at the same time, longer battery life than what Raptor Lake chips were capable of. The company also wants a large piece of the AI cake and is working with Microsoft and other partners to make that happen. As a result, Windows Defender is now AI-enabled, meaning it can use the Intel NPU to take some of the load off the main CPU cores. We also get this new Intel Device Discovery technology that is designed to give us a better hardware-based remote laptop management than ever before; and, to make things even better, Intel now offers a dedicated Arc Pro graphics driver for workstations.

This generation of Intel Core processors features Redwood architecture P-cores and Crestmont architecture E-cores. Both come with slight architectural improvements over Raptor Cove and Gracemont respectively for slightly higher performance-per-clock figures; the interesting thing is that of the 10 E-cores, two are actually a separate cluster located on what Intel calls a "Low Power Island". Essentially, the latter is an SoC within an SoC that can stay active while most other parts of the chip are temporarily switched off to save power. The low-power E-cores run at up to 2.5 GHz. Intel hopes this approach will let it deliver unprecedentedly low power consumption figures when under low load, boosting battery life of laptops and tablets powered by Meteor Lake.

To build its Meteor Lake processors, Intel uses the Foveros technology (stacking several chips on top of each other). This is a cost-cutting measure more than anything else, as manufacturing several small dies on several different processes is so much cheaper than making a huge single die and hoping that there are no defects in it that will require disabling some parts of it.

Elsewhere, the Core Ultra 7 155H comes with 24 MB of L3 cache and a very healthy number of PCIe 5 and PCIe 4 lanes for NVMe SSD speeds up to 15.7 GB/s. It supports RAM running at up to 7467 MHz (DDR5-5600, LPDDR5-7467, LPDDR5x-7467, to be specific - which is about as good as what 8040 series Ryzen chips have). Naturally, the chip features built-in Thunderbolt 4 support and Intel CNVi Wi-Fi support; fascinatingly enough, Intel chose to keep native SATA III support that AMD had removed from its Ryzen processors quite a while ago.

The 155H is compatible with 64-bit Windows 10, 64-bit Windows 11 and with many Linux distros.

Performance

If one chooses to trust the official performance data published by Intel, then the 155H is about as fast as the Ryzen 9 6900HX (Zen 3 Plus, 8 cores, 16 threads, up to 4.9 GHz), as far as multi-thread performance is concerned. This isn't a ground-breaking result but let's just wait for our in-house testing results instead of jumping to conclusions.

Either way, real-world performance of the chip may vary significantly depending on how high the CPU power limits are and how competent the cooling solution of the system is.

Graphics

The 8-core Arc GPU running at up to 2.30 GHz is slated to be a proper alternative to the mighty Radeon 780M. The thing is almost as fast as the GTX 1650 (Laptop) and the RTX 2050 (Laptop) to represent some seriously solid performance gains over aging Xe-series integrated GPUs. If one chooses to take Intel's word for it, that is.

A proper DX12 Ultimate graphics adapter, the Arc is no stranger to ray tracing and other modern technologies including AI frame generation (XeSS). It will let you connect up to four SUHD 4320p monitors and it will both HW-encode and HW-encode the most widely used video codecs including AVC, HEVC and AV1 in a fast and efficient manner.

Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are, how competent the cooling solution of your system is, how fast the RAM of your system is. The latter is really important; Intel stresses that for the Arc to deliver the best results possible, multi-channel RAM configuration is a must.

Power consumption

This mighty Core Ultra 7 series processor has a Base power consumption of 28 W, while its Turbo power consumption is not supposed to exceed 115 W. Its Base power consumption is supposed to be around 64 W, however, most laptop makers will probably go for a higher value to get higher clock speeds and thus better performance. Either way, a powerful cooling solution will be needed to sort out this chip's hot temper.

The 155H is comprised of five small chips ("tiles") that are connected using Intel's Foveros technology. The tile containing main CPU cores is produced on the fairly modern 7 nm Intel process marketed as Intel 4 while most other tiles (the iGPU, the I/O die, ...) are built with TSMC's N5 and N6 processes. The base tile is built with the old Intel 22FFL process.