Intel launches 11th Gen Core Tiger Lake

Up to 4.8 GHz at 50 W, 2x GPU with Xe, new branding

Tiger Lake will power Intel’s next generation of notebook-class devices. These new 11th Generation Core processors use four of Intel’s latest cores built with the Willow Cove microarchitecture – a slightly modified version of the Sunny Cove microarchitecture found in Intel’s 10th Generation Ice Lake processors.

These new cores offer more performance than before, peaking at 4.8GHz compared to the 4.0GHz seen in the previous generation, a 20 percent improvement. However the underlying clock-for-clock performance improvements are minimal, with Intel instead focusing on that frequency gain.

The reason for the frequency gain comes from the manufacturing process – formerly Intel’s 10++ process, renamed once to 10+ and then again during Intel’s recent Architecture Day to its new name: Intel’s 10nm SuperFin technology. The goal with this manufacturing process was two-fold: firstly to increase efficiency and scalability to enable higher frequencies, but also to improve yields. As a result, we will see Intel claiming higher frequencies, that lead to higher performance, at similar power levels to the previous generation.

These cores support AVX-512, as well as Intel’s DL-Boost acceleration libraries.

On the graphics side, Tiger Lake uses Intel’s new Xe-LP graphics architecture, which the company also detailed at Architecture Day. Simply put, Xe-LP increases the raw thread count and compute count per execution unit (EU), as well as the cache hierarchy and some acceleration features. For Ice Lake we saw 64 EUs running at 1100MHz, whereas for Tiger Lake we will see 96 EUs (+50 percent) running at 1350MHz (+22 percent). Add in some of the other benefits and we should supposedly see a 2x improvement in graphics performance compared to the previous generation on paper.

For AI compute, the graphics also supports DP4A instructions for INT8 inference workloads.

The graphics display pipeline has been improved, with support for AV1 decode, as well as display pipes for up to four 4K60 displays or a single 8K60 display. Other improvements to Tiger Lake include native Thunderbolt 4 support, with the controller embedded into the CPU allowing for up to four TB4 ports per device. Wi-Fi 6 support is also enabled through a CNVi interface.