Akasa Newton TN, OEM

The Intel NUC11TNKi5 provided us with the opportunity to evaluate the Tiger Lake-U platform in a manner intended by Intel. Our previous evaluations involving the ASRock Industrial NUC BOX-1165G7 and Supermicro's SYS-E100-12T-H had the vendors' own take on configuring the system for specific markets. Intel's NUC Pro line targets the typical home / business PC user. Comparing Intel's default BIOS configuration with that of ASRock Industrial and Supermicro enabled us to understand the various options affecting the performance and efficiency of the system. It goes without saying that Intel's configuration of PL1 and PL2 limits, as well as configuration of C-states, provides the best balance between performance and energy consumption. As a mid-tier offering, the Core i5-1135G7-based NUC we looked at today completely blew away the competition in its price range. Multi-threaded workloads continue to remain a weakness when compared against high-end Renoir SKUs. At the lower TDPs, TGL-U has the distinct disadvantage of not having enough cores to go ahainst the top-end Renoir-based UCFF PCs. However, user experience continues to rely a lot on single-threaded performance. This is evidenced by the results of some of the key real-world benchmarks (such as web browsing) going in favor of Tiger Lake-U. In any case, the market will soon see Cezanne and Alder Lake-P dueling it out in the mini-PC space - so this just sets some context for those comparisons.