Hands-on with Intel’s i7-1185G7 Tiger Lake prototype laptop

Enlarge / This MSI-built reference system is powered with a Tiger Lake i7-1185G7, the highest-end CPU in Intel's upcoming lineup. (credit: Jim Salter)

We've been very interested in Intel's upcoming laptop CPUs, codenamed Tiger Lake, since the company's Architecture Day event in August. Tiger Lake's official launch event earlier this month didn't offer much red meat for anyone already up-to-date on the news-but today, we finally have our own hands-on test results to share.

Much as Intel did during Tiger Lake's launch event, we're going to focus heavily on Intel versus AMD in our own tests and analysis. In our opinion, the current generation-on-generation within Intel's own lineup is fairly boring (yes, it's faster than its old parts). Instead, the real question is whether Intel finally has an answer to AMD's Renoir architecture-and the answer isn't as simple as "yes" or "no."

Our reference system has the top-of-the-line Core i7-1185G7 CPU, tuned for a 28W default TDP-although that, too, gets complicated. For now, we'll just note that it's the fastest Tiger Lake CPU to be announced. However, assuming one i7-1185G7 system is much like the next would be a mistake.

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