Somewhere in Taiwan, there is a laptop. Not much of a story in itself, perhaps, but that laptop is based on Intel’s new Tiger Lake-H processor, with eight cores, 16 threads, and Xe-powered graphics.
Those eight cores are built on the Willow Cove architecture. There’s not much change from Sunny Cove apart from the fact it uses the 10nm SuperFin process. Finally, Intel. Finally.
The other big news here is the cache system, which can balloon to 24MB of LLC to help single-thread performance (said to be 10-20% better than Ice Lake’s). The Gen-12 GPU, which has 50% more execution units than Ice Lake, will add increased media encode/decode abilities, and can drive an 8K HDR display. There are a few more ‘magic instructions’ too. Expect to see these chips in high-end laptops through 2021.
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The benchmark that gained the attention of our friends at Tom’s Hardware comes from UserBenchmark, and shows a system called ‘Insyde TigerLake’ turbo boosting to 2.75GHz from a base clock of 3.1GHz, which can’t be right, and throws the rest of the figures—such as the unusual 20GB of RAM—into question. The SSD, despite being a pitiful 128GB, shows off Tiger Lake’s PCI-E 4.0 capabilities with a read speed of 5,000MB/s. You get Thunderbolt 4 and USB4 too, which will probably be quite quick.
What’s most interesting here is that this is the first time Tiger Lake has been spotted in the wild, rather than the performance figures, which have got to be wrongly reported. Intel needs something hot to hit back at Ryzen 5000, we’ll find out soon if this is it.
