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Higher power consumption, lower clocks.

Intel introduced its long-awaited eight-core Tiger Lake-H chips for laptops, marking Intel’s first shipping eight-core 10nm chips for the consumer market. These new 11th-generation chips, which Intel touts as the ‘World’s best gaming laptop processors,’ come as the company faces unprecedented challenges in the laptop market – not only is it contending with AMD’s increasingly popular 7nm Ryzen “Renoir” chips, but perhaps more importantly, Intel is also now playing defence against Apple’s innovative new Arm-based M1 that powers its new MacBooks.

The halo eight-core 16-thread Core i9-11980HK peaks at 5.0GHz on two cores, fully supports overclocking, and despite its official 65W TDP, can consume up to 107W in base mode and 135W under heavy load in high performance mode. Additionally, Intel has also added limited overclocking support in the form of a speed optimiser and unlocked memory settings for three of the ‘standard’ eight-core models.

As with Intel’s lower-power Tiger Lake chips, the eight-core models come fabbed on the company’s 10nm SuperFin process and feature Willow Cove execution cores paired with the UHD Graphics 750 engine with the Xe Architecture. These chips will most often be paired with a discrete graphics solution, from Nvidia or AMD.

All told, Intel claims that the combination of the new CPU microarchitecture and process node offers up to 19 percent higher IPC, which naturally results in higher performance potential in both gaming and applications. That comes with a bit of a caveat, though – while Intel’s previousgen eight-core 14nm laptop chips topped out at 5.3 GHz, Tiger Lake-H maxes out at 5.0GHz. Intel says the higher IPC throws the balance towards even higher performance regardless of 10nm’s lower clock speed.

Intel says the new Tiger Lake-H chips will come to market in 80 new designs (15 of these are for the vPro equivalents). Surprisingly, Intel says that it has shipped over 1 million eight-core Tiger Lake chips to its partners before the first devices have even shipped to customers, showing that the company fully intends to leverage its production heft while its competitors, like AMD, continue to grapple with shortages. Intel also plans to keep its current fleet of 10th-Gen Comet Lake processors on the market for the foreseeable future to address the lower rungs of the market, so its 14nm chips will still ship in volume.

“Intel claims that the combination of the new CPU microarchitecture and process node offers up to 19 percent higher IPC.”