Intel Tiger Lake U processor annihilates the Core i7-8665U and Ryzen 7 3700U in UserBenchmark, scores up to 13% more than the Core i9-9980HK in the process

It has only been a few weeks since we reported on the capabilities of an Intel Tiger Lake Y series chip, which boasted Core i9-8950HK level single-core performance despite only having a 5 W thermal design power (TDP). We are still awaiting a wide-scale release of Intel's Comet Lake U and Ice Lake U series too, but @KOMACHI_ENSAKA and UserBenchmark have already given an insight into what their successor will offer.

As an alleged release roadmap demonstrated in April, the successor to Comet Lake U will arrive in Q2 2021 at the earliest and is codenamed Tiger Lake U. The 15-28W series will also be Intel's first to be manufactured on 10 nm processes, alongside Tiger Lake Y.

UserBenchmark reports both CPUs as Intel 0000, the name that the recent Tiger Lake Y chip we reported on also goes by. The website groups these three listings together, but their names and boost clock speeds indicate that we are looking at two CPUs rather than three ones of one processor. UserBenchmark confirms that Tiger Lake U will feature quad-core processors as the alleged release roadmap stated, with the chips also supporting Intel Hyper-Threading, which is unsurprising.

Both Tiger Lake U benchmarks report the mysterious CPU as having Gen 12 Intel UHD Graphics and a 1.2 GHz base clock, with it also able to average a 3.6 GHz boost clock. The processor scored 216 points in both single-threaded runs, which puts its single-core performance at almost 13% higher than the Core i9-9980HK, 30% beyond the Core i7-8665U and 67% better than the Ryzen 7 3700U.

The Tiger Lake U processor also excelled in the quadcore equivalent, with it averaging 617.5 points. By contrast, UserBenchmark has the Core i9-9980HK averaging 664 points and the Core i7-8665U way behind on 398 points. The Tiger Lake U outdoes the Core i7-8665U and Ryzen 7 3700U in multicore work too, although it falls significantly short of what the Core i9-9980HK can do. Essentially, the 10 nm chip has the same multicore performance in UserBenchmark as the Core i5-9400, with it also unable to match what modern H series processors score.

UserBenchmark also claims that Windows throttled the CPU's performance to 83% in both benchmark runs, so these results are likely to be worse than what the retail equivalents will eventually achieve. Additionally, this processor is likely an engineering sample, which generally perform worse than their retail counterparts. There is no way to tell whether these results would scale linearly, so we cannot extrapolate what the CPU could achieve at 100% by upscaling the results by 17%. However, the switch to 10 nm looks set to bring significant performance improvements for U series processors. Just eighteen months or so to wait, then, before we can get our hands on a Tiger Lake U powered laptop.