Intel unveils Tiger Lake mobile CPUs

Last week, Intel launched its 11th Gen Intel Core processors with Intel Iris Xe graphics at its Tiger Lake Virtual Launch Event in a bid to shake up the laptop CPU market. 

With such news came plenty of grand claims from Intel, following on from its announcement last month that Tiger Lake would offer "dramatic" clock-speed increases. For now, we're dependent on Intel's claims rather than independent benchmarks but it's looking pretty good. The base clock speed of the best CPU, the four-core, eight-thread Core i7-1185G7, reaches 3GHz with single-core turbo speeds achieving 4.8GHz.

In all, Intel is launching nine new Tiger Lake processors for notebooks with five of those including the new Xe integrated graphics core. There will be dozens of choices for anyone looking for a laptop that takes advantage of the new architecture with all the usual partners providing laptops.

Intel reckons that Tiger Lake will be 2.7 times as fast as "competitive products" in video editing while also offering an extra hour or so of battery life compared to Ice Lake. Wondering what it means by "competitive products"? Ryzen mobile processors seems the most likely option here.

Amongst its many new chips, there are two specific classes of CPU. There's the higher-power UP3 series which includes five chips ranging from the dual-core 3GHz Core i3-1115G4 to the aforementioned four-core, eight-thread Core i7-1185G7. Alongside that range is also the lower-power UP4 series which is aimed at tablets and thin-and-light laptops with processors ranging from a 1.8GHz dual-core Intel Core i3-1110G4 to a 1.2GHz quad-core Core i7-1160G7.

A couple of chips in between - the Intel Core i3-1125G4 and Core i3-1120G4 - won't actually see a release until 2021 though.

In all cases, there are significant clock speed boosts compared to the first 10th generation Ice Lake processors but there's also a significant improvement to the Xe integrated graphics included with many of the chips. It now supports 8K HDR displays along with up to four simultaneous 4K HDR displays, and Dolby Vision. Intel reckons that it will outperform "90 percent of the discrete graphics in the segment" although we really need to see this backed up by other sources. For now though, benchmark graphs from Intel do look rather promising. 

In addition, Tiger Lake is also Intel's first line to support PCIe Gen4 with its notebooks offering up to four Thunderbolt 4 ports along with WiFi 6. 

If a new laptop is on your mind soon, the next few weeks should be the ideal time for a substantial upgrade.