Intel Tiger Lake, latest laptop processors from Blue Camp

7/9/2020

Intel has today announced Tiger Lake, its new 11th Generation Intel Core mobile processor series. As the successor to the current Ice Lake generation, Intel claims Tiger Lake is set to become the ‘world’s best processor for thin-and-light laptops’. This means you won’t find Tiger Lake in powerful gaming laptops, but in ultrabooks such as the Dell XPS and Surface Laptop devices.

Over 150 laptops are expected to launch with the Tiger Lake processor, including devices from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo MSI, Razer and Samsung. Intel also revealed that a new Samsung Galaxy Book Flex will soon launch with 5G capabilities thanks to the new innovation of Tiger Lake.

The main new features for Intel Tiger Lake include:

Based on 10nm Willow Cove architecture
Up to 4.8GHz frequency speeds
Intel Xe graphics 2x more powerful than Ice Lake
Improved battery life
Thunderbolt 4 support
Integrated Wi-Fi 6
5G compatibility
Support for 8K HDR displays
Hardware-supported Dolby Vision

Intel Tiger Lake release date
With Intel officially revealing Intel Tiger Lake today, you can expect laptops to start shipping with the next-gen processors very soon. Intel said such systems should arrive “in time for holiday”.

Many manufacturers will try and launch laptops with Tiger Lake as quickly as possible, with the likes of Asus, HP and Lenovo already revealing their own laptops that feature the new chips.

Other manufacturers such as Microsoft will likely stick to their own launch schedules. We’re expecting new Surface devices to be unveiled in October, for example.

Intel Tiger Lake specs – How powerful are they?
Intel has announced there will be a total of nine Tiger Lake processors launched. They’ll be split up between UP3 and UP4 ranges, with the former limited to a 15-watt thermal envelope and the latter allowed up to 28W for increased performance power.

The UP4 range can be seen below:

One thing that you may immediately notice is that the most powerful Tiger Lake processor only has 4 cores and 8 threads. In comparison, AMD’s Ryzen 7 4700G chip boasts 8 cores and 16 threads, which you’d assume would result in a superior multi-threaded performance.

We asked Intel about this, and a representative responded by saying they’re not concerned about the number of cores as they believe the Intel cores are ‘better’. We’ll have to wait until we can benchmark the processor ourselves.

One area where Intel does dominate is single-core frequency speeds. The Intel Core i7-1185G7 chip sees up to a 4.8GHz frequency, while the top-range Ryzen 7 4700G can only hit 4.4 GHz. Intel’s new processors also seem to operate at a far lower power level than AMD’s chip, which could potentially result in a boosted battery performance.

Intel is also launching the UP3 range, which operates at even lower power levels. Performance will be more limited with these processors, but they could result in smaller designs and even better battery life. Chromebooks may well be a good shout for these chips.

The most exciting improvement for Tiger Lake is arguably the new Xe graphics though. Intel claims the new integrated graphics engine will result in a 2x performance increase from Ice Lake, allowing users to engage in content creation and gaming without requiring a discrete graphics card.

While Ice Lake was only really capable of running eSports games such as Fortnite and Apex Legends, Intel suggests Tiger Lake can play the likes of Borderlands 3, Far Cry New Dawn and Hitman 2 in 1080p. You’ll probably need to tweak the graphics settings to make that possible, but such a prospect is still very exciting. Intel claims the gaming performance is better than what you’d expect from Nvidia’s MX350+ graphics card.