Intel has now revealed properly and launched 'Tiger Lake', their 11th Gen Intel Core processors with 'Willow Cove' cores backed up by their new Xe graphics architecture. As posted about previously if you missed it, we went over Intel's dedicated GPU info here.
Plenty of marketing speak to get through, with their claim that it's the "best processor Intel has ever built… and it certainly rises above all the imitators". Tiger Lake will come in Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 varieties and is aimed at mobile form factor, so think notebook / laptops. Quite exciting as it comes with their next-generation Xe graphics, better AI performance, Thunderbolt 4 and Wi-Fi 6.
This is how Intel hopes to continue fighting against AMD's strong Ryzen line-up, while they're still struggling along trying to get every tiny bit of juice they can out of 10nm with their new "SuperFin" tech. Intel say this allows them to "optimize power efficiency with leading performance and responsiveness while running at significantly higher frequencies versus prior generations". Official specs from Intel:
| Processor | GPU | Cores / Threads | Graphics (EUs) | Cache | Memory | Operating Range | Base Freq (GHz) | Max Single Core Turbo (GHz, up to) | Max All Core Turbo (GHz, up to) | Graphics Max Freq (GHz, up to) | ||
| Intel® Core™ i7-1185G7 | Intel Iris Xe | 4/8 | 96 | 12MB | DDR4-3200 LPDDR4x-4266 | 12-28W | 3.0 | 4.8 | 4.3 | 1.35 | ||
| Intel® Core™ i7-1165G7 | Intel Iris Xe | 4/8 | 96 | 12MB | DDR4-3200 LPDDR4x-4266 | 12-28W | 2.8 | 4.7 | 4.1 | 1.30 | ||
| Intel® Core™ i5-1135G7 | Intel Iris Xe | 4/8 | 80 | 8MB | DDR4-3200 LPDDR4x-4266 | 12-28W | 2.4 | 4.2 | 3.8 | 1.30 | ||
| Intel® Core™ i3-1125G4 | Intel UHD Graphics | 4/8 | 48 | 8MB | DDR4-3200 LPDDR4x-3733 | 12-28W | 2.0 | 3.7 | 3.3 | 1.25 | ||
| Intel® Core™ i3-1115G4 | Intel UHD Graphics | 2/4 | 48 | 6MB | DDR4-3200 LPDDR4x-3733 | 12-28W | 3.0 | 4.1 | 4.1 | 1.25 | ||
| Intel® Core™ i7-1160G7 | Intel Iris Xe | 4/8 | 96 | 12MB | LPDDR4x-4266 | 7-15W | 1.2 | 4.4 | 3.6 | 1.1 | ||
| Intel® Core™ i5-1130G7 | Intel Iris Xe | 4/8 | 80 | 8MB | LPDDR4x-4266 | 7-15W | 1.1 | 4.0 | 3.4 | 1.1 | ||
| Intel® Core™ i3-1120G4 | Intel UHD Graphics | 4/8 | 48 | 8MB | LPDDR4x-4266 | 7-15W | 1.1 | 3.5 | 3.0 | 1.1 | ||
| Intel® Core™ i3-1110G4 | Intel UHD Graphics | 2/4 | 48 | 6MB | LPDDR4x-4266 | 7-15W | 1.8 | 3.9 | 3.9 | 1.1 | ||
Looking through all the other details they also mentioned support for the AV1 Codec, which is another exciting step for this modern codec to allow better data compression which is going to be essential for video. This is also supported in the new NVIDIA 30 series GPUs.
During the event they also showed off the starting line-up of systems from Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung (with a 5G modem) and Asus. They mentioned more than 50 designs to be available for the upcoming major holiday season and over 150 designs coming in total. So, expect lots of hardware out there by the end of the year for Tiger Lake.
To go along with all the new hardware coming, Intel also announced their new Intel Evo branding. Intel Evo is supposed to be the best of the best, representing hardware with Intel's new kit that isn't cheapo. So if you see something mentioning Intel Evo, it's met a number of conditions set by Intel like nine or more hours battery life, fast charging for 4 hours use on a 30 minute charge and more.
As expected, all their press info is directed at Windows and also ChromeOS, so we have no idea currently how they perform under Linux.
If you're going to be getting anything with Tiger Lake, you're likely going to need to ensure you have a really fresh Linux Kernel and Mesa version to ensure good support.
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