Intel is offering Tiger Lake chips in two packages: One with a 12 to 28-watt thermal profile and other reaching 7 to 14 watts. That gives PC makers the flexibility to use the CPUs in a variety of hardware designs. The fastest Tiger Lake chip will be the quad-core i7-1185G7, which features Intel Xe graphics and clock speeds ranging from 3GHz to 4.8 GHz. For the truly thin and light machines, the best you can get is the i7-1160G7 with Iris Xe graphics and a 1.2GHz to 4.4 GHz clock.
Intel is using a refined “SuperFin” FinFET transistor process in Tiger Lake, which allows the processors to reach far higher clock speeds than the previous generation. Notably, Intel says these CPUs are its biggest speed improvement within a single generation (in this case, its 10nm architecture). So sure, it would be nice to see some 7nm Intel CPUs eventually, but the company is still managing to eke out gains with its existing technology.
You can expect more than a 20 percent CPU speed improvement, as well as graphics that are twice as fast as last year’s Ice Lake graphics. While the company’s Xe graphics won’t be a replacement for true gaming fans, Intel showed off some impressive benchmarks for casual players. In Gears Tactics, an 11th-gen chip with Xe graphics reached around 55FPS, while a 10th gen chip with an NVIDIA MX350 was around 50FPS, and AMD’s Ryzn 4800U reached around 31FPS. AMD has been able to lean on its Radeon hardware to bundle better graphics with its chips for years. Now, Intel finally might be able to compete.
You’ll be able to find the new Tiger Lake CPUs in the latest notebooks from ASUS, Dell, Acer and other manufacturers later this year.
