Intel Lakefield CPU Benchmarks Show Promising Performance

News outlet Notebookcheck has benchmarked Samsung's refreshed Galaxy Book S that comes with the Intel Core i5-L16G7, one Intel's two new Lakefield hybrid processors.

If you haven't been keeping up with Intel's best CPU launches lately, here's the rundown. The Core i5-L16G7 comes with five CPU cores. It's a 10nm chip that utilizes Foveros 3D stacking technology to bind one Sunny Cove core with four Tremont Atom cores. The premise is similar to Arm's big.LITTLE microarchitecture in that the Sunny Cove core takes care of heavy workloads and the Tremont cores for everything else.

Intel markets the Core i5-L16G7 with a 1.4 GHz base clock and 3 GHz boost clock. The 1.4 GHz base clock is for all five cores, and the 3 GHz boost clock is only on the Sunny Cove core. If you want to get into specifics, the Tremont cores' boost clock is 2.8 GHz, and the all-core boost clock for the Core i5-L16G7 is 1.8 GHz. 

Intel advertises the Core i5-L16G7 with 7W TDP (thermal design power), which is the PL1 (power level 1). The PL2 for the Core i5-L16G7 is actually 9.5W.

The Core i5-L16G7 has 4MB of cache and comes with 4GB of LPDDR4X-4267 memory. On the graphics end, the Core i5-L16G7 sports the Gen11 iGPU, which is comprised of 64 Execution Units (EUs) that peak at 500 MHz.

Intel Core i5-L16G7 Benchmarks

Notebookcheck noted that the operating system was responsible for assigning the workloads to the different cores. The publication didn't specify whether it tried targeting individual threads through affinity allocation.

The outlet recorded a 2.4 GHz boost clock on the Core i5-L16G7 in the single-core stress test and a 1.9 GHz boost clock on the multi-core stress test.

The Geekbench 5.1 results showed that the Snapdragon 8cx was faster than the Core i5-L16G7 in multi-core performance. However, Intel's chip held superior single-core performance. The Core i5-L16G7 was also faster than the Core m3-8100Y in the multi-core test but slightly lagged behind the two-year-old chip in the single-core test.

Cinebench R20 confirmed the Core i5-L16G7's position on the Core m3-8100Y. Once again, the Lakefield chip delivered higher multi-core performance but fell to the Core m3-8100Y in the single-core test.

Notebookcheck's data revealed that the Core i5-L16G7's Gen11 iGPU pushed the chip ahead of the Snapdragon 8cx in 3DMark 11. In the more modern 3DMark benchmark, the Core i5-L16G7 even managed to beat the Core i3-1000NG4, which features 49 EUs that run between 300 and 900 MHz. 

While the results look good, real-world gaming told another story. The difference between the two Intel processors was less than 1 frame per second.

The fact that Lakefield behaves a lot like Arm's big.LITTLE design isn't a coincidence. The main reason behind Lakefield's conception is for Intel to compete against Arm in the same ring. Though limited, the benchmarks show the Intel's Core i5-L16G7 besting the Snapdragon 8cx in single-core and graphical performance. Nevertheless, the Snapdragon 8cx still reigns supreme in multi-core performance.