This year, Intel has taken quite a beating, from the unwavering onslaught of AMD to the damning Apple Silicon M1 benchmarks. The announcement of its 11th-gen Tiger Lake laptop processors has been forced to the sidelines and it is searching for ways to get back into the spotlight. What better way to do that than by calling out its eternal rival AMD over the output of the latter’s battery and, sure enough, Intel’s benchmarks show it to have the upper hand in that unique use case.
Intel has traditionally dominated the desktop market where power drawing and thermal management were less concerned with towering computers. Laptops dominate the market these days, though and battery life and heat dissipation have become just as critical or even more important than raw performance. Unfortunately, these were areas for Intel where its mobile processors have not performed to the satisfaction of users.
Intel addresses at least one of those issues in its latest marketing campaign, specifically the performance of its new Tiger Lake processors based on its Evo platform when the laptop is running entirely on battery power. With laptops running on AMD’s Ryzen 4000 series, it pits its 11th-gen processors to see which of the two sets squeezes the most out of battery power. The outcome is unsurprising given who is considering who’s running the tests and presenting the result.
Although it concedes that the chips of AMD perform better in battery life benchmarks, when it comes to actual data and number crunching, Intel also points out the better and more consistent performance of its own CPUs. It also takes note of very odd behaviour by AMD processors where the CPUs delay burst and responsiveness for about 10 seconds. Unsurprisingly, it also points out the inconsistency of Cinebench’s performance, the least favourite suite.
Of course, battery efficiency is just a single part of the picture, and Intel allegedly forbid the press from testing and talking about battery life, the other area where its chips were notoriously poor. Intel has also been quiet on benchmark comparisons with the shiny new ARM-based M1 from Apple so far but it is probably choosing its battles where it has a slight chance of succeeding.