Benchmarks: CPU
There's no doubt about it, Core i9-11980HK is Intel's highest-performing mobile processor to date, but reading between the lines reveals a few interesting details.
As expected, the IPC and architecture enhancements of the 11th Gen Tiger Lake-H allow the reference laptop to climb to the top of the single-thread charts, where Intel has historically performed well.
In the multi-threaded tests, the i9-11980HK does what it needed to do by closing the gap on AMD Ryzen competitors. Performance in Cinebench is up almost 40 per cent over the previous-generation i9-10980HK featured in Gigabyte's Aero 15 OLED, but those gains do come at a cost. Our logs reveal that the 65W CPU configuration (65W PL1, 109W PL2) allows the real-world boost clock during demanding workloads to climb from ~3GHz on 10th Gen to ~3.4GHz this time around.
We're curious to see how retail laptops, likely to be configured to 45W, will compare. Note that the 7nm, 45W Ryzen 7 5800H is able to hold 3.7GHz across all eight cores in the same test.
