Lenovo Yoga 7i 2-in-1 Laptop: i7-1165G7, 15.6" 1080p, 16GB DDR4, 1TB SSD Expired

Holy cow, it's like Lenovo specifically made this for the "looking for a value PC but ugh screen too dim/no touchscreen" SD crowd. 🤯

You are correct. And don't go by what is the TDP defined by the Processor manufacturers. There is no specific definition for TDP and Intel and AMD both defines TDP in their own terms, which Intel's one is more or less meaningless.

Before Tiger Lake, TDP means to Intel is that that is the power the CPU would require to maintain the base clock speed. Say take an example of Comet Lake i7-10510U which has a base clock of 1.8 GHz and Boost clock of 4.9 GHz. So, the 15W TDP will guarantee that 15W will be able to make all the 4 Cores running at Base frequency of 1.9 GHz.

In 11th Gen Tiger Lake, say 1165G7, you'll see that base Frequency of 2.8 GHz and Boost of 4.7 GHz. So a normal person would assume that at least at 15W, that Processor will be able to sustain 2.8 GHz, right? WORNG. Now Intel needs 28W TDP setting to even hit that Base frequency of 2.8 GHz and if it goes down to 15W, the clock speed can go down to 1.2-1.4 GHz. Basically Tiger Lake has better IPC but it needs more power to reach those clock speeds. That's the reason, there is no guarantee that if you buy an Core i7 11th Gen, it will perform better than i5 in another laptop because it depends on the cooling and TDP and Tiger Lake performs all over the place. In your XPS 13, I think Dell has set the long term PL2 to 28W which is pretty high for that thin & light Laptop and the Thermal Throttle limit to 100 degree C. So, even when it is reaching over 90 degree, it still maintains the performance but gets really hotter. I am not sure but normally in BIOS, Dell has a setting called TCC which basically adds a negative offset to the Thermal throttling limit. Their gaming Laptops have it, not sure if XPS having it. Go to BIOS by pressing F2 during boot and it should be under Performance Tab. Try to set that to 10 which will start throttling the laptop at 100-10 = 90 degree C and hence provide a better thermal experience.


On the other hand, Ryzen Processors require less power to maintain their clock speed and generate less heat. I have two of them and they run good amount cooler despite having twice the number of cores.

For U series low powered devices, no there won't be anything more than 4 Cores, even with their 10 nm nodes. Their 10 nm process is not matured enough, especially due to their single chip design where all the cores and their interconnect bus are directly inside a single die, unlike AMD's chiplet based architecture where for Cores, they have a chiplet called CCX and for I/O and interconnects, they have another chiplet based on 14nm/12nm.

The Intel's design is not scalable with their current 10nm node to accommodate more cores and reaching higher clock speed at reasonable power requirements. I think you understand that Power consumption was so high that they could not release 10nm Processors for Desktop where you can have a lot higher thermal celling compared to a Laptop.