TIGER LAKE HAS CLAWS

Intel’s new mobile chip promises double-digit speed bump

INTEL’S 11TH-GENERATION Tiger Lake is set to launch, and the company claims there are 50 “fantastic” notebooks ready to roll. Tiger Lake is the replacement for the Ice Lake series of low-power mobile processors with integrated graphics. It uses a 10nm processor and sports Intel’s most modern core architecture, Willow Cove, an enhanced version of Ice Lake’s Sunny Cove.

The specifications read well: We have PCIe 4.0, Wi-Fi 6, USB 4, Thunderbolt 4, deep-learning AI boost, HEVC, and VP9 hardware decoding. The two things that stand out are the graphics subsystem: This will be the first commercial appearance of Intel’s Xe graphics engine, with up to 96 execution units, against 64 in Ice Lake. The other is that Intel has managed to crank up the clock speeds while keeping power consumption down. A four-core engineering sample much reported (probably a Core i7-1165G) has a TDP of 25W but manages a base clock speed of 2.8GHz. This is better than the Ice Lake i7-1068G, which chugs along at 2.3GHz while burning through 28W. There will be faster varieties too—a 3GHz chip has been spotted. Add a few IPC gains, and we have a decent jump in processing power. The Xe graphics will build on that, bringing a “huge leap” according to Intel. The upshot is a double-digit performance boost over its predecessor.

Tiger Lake will be competing head to head against AMD’s 7nm Ryzen 4000-series mobile parts, which have earned praise for their performance. Intel has responded robustly, and AMD has a fight on its hands in the lucrative mobile market. All this is excellent news if you are in the market for a new notebook. Meanwhile, we are still waiting for Intel to get its latest designs into the desktop.