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After months of leaks, rumors, and speculation, Intel formally and officially released the details of its 11-generation processor, code-named Tiger Lake. The processor leverages Intel’s SuperFin 10 nm process and introduces Intel’s first integrated Iris Xe GPU claiming 2× the performance over the previous generation — 2× is a lot. The CPU and other processors as well as the communications fabric have also been improved. The whole story is nicely summarized in the following diagram.
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| Intel’s 11th Gen Tiger Lake processor’s features (Source: Intel) |
Intel is offering nine versions of the processor, three i7, two i5, and four i3 with different core counts and clock frequencies.
As you might imagine the new processor does very well on benchmark tests Intel says, your mileage may differ depending upon how the OEM implemented the device.
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| Intel’s i7-1185G7’s Ice Lake performance vs Intel’s i7-1065G7 and AMD’s Ryzen 7-4800U (Source: Intel) |
Intel didn’t stop with just the processor, but rather in the style of their Athena project, which helped spawn the generation of thin and light machines, Intel has developed a platform they call Evo. Evo as you can imagine is even thinner and lighter, has longer battery life, better connectivity, and can drive external screens up to 8K. Intel says the Evo platform featuring 11th Gen Intel Core processors and Intel Iris Xe graphics are the best processors for thin-and-light laptops … now … because of their capabilities in collaboration, creation, gaming, and entertainment across Windows and ChromeOS based laptops.
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| Innovating beyond the processor, Intel has a total design plan—EVO (Source: Intel) |
Targeting creatives, gamers, office workers (in the office, on the train, or at home), and lifestyle streamers, Intel hopes Evo will put an end to the question tablet or notebook once and for all.
The company is claiming it has over 150 design wins based on its 11th Gen Intel Core processors that are expected from OEMs such as Acer, Asus, Dell, Dynabook, HP, Lenovo, LG, MSI, Razer, Samsung, and others. The expected useful battery life of these new FHD notebooks is expected to be 9 hours or more—almost a full day’s operation.
What do we think?
Intel’s Ice Lake processor has been on the most wanted list of most OEMs for over a year. Manufacturing difficulties with Intel’s 10 nm process delayed the rollout and now hopefully that is behind us. The new thin and light notebooks will show up just in time for back to work and back to school buyers, and hopefully fuel a continuation of the growth we’ve seen in the PC market this year.