Intel’s Tiger Lake Lake 11th-gen processors for laptops were recently revealed maxing out at quad-core chips, but there will be beefier 8-core mobile offerings on the way it has emerged.
This information came to light thanks to a post on Medium.com from Intel’s Boyd Phelps, Corporate VP of the Client Computing Group, who mentioned that the 8-core CPUs are incoming.
In the post, which discusses the architectural breakthroughs Intel made with the 11th-gen silicon, Phelps observed (with the bolding added by us for emphasis): “The Willow Cove core increases the mid-level cache to 1.25MB – up from 512KB. We also added a 3MB non-inclusive last-level-cache (LLC) per core slice. A single core workload has access to 12MB of LLC in the 4-core die or up to 24MB in the 8-core die configuration (more detail on 8-core products at a later date).”
So there you have it – although you might have expected Intel to trumpet the presence of 8-core models a bit more loudly. Doubtless, that fanfare will be coming down the line…
As it stands, even with the current range-topping quad-core (8-thread) Tiger Lake mobile processors, Intel has made serious strides forward with its SuperFin technology plus new architecture (Willow Cove), not to mention integrated Xe graphics.
Game changer?
Certainly for gaming, Intel is making some tantalizing promises of doubling up the performance levels compared to 10th-gen processors for some games (including Borderlands 3, Far Cry New Dawn and Hitman 2) at 1080p resolution on a laptop.
Of course, we really need to test these claims ourselves, and are looking forward to getting Tiger Lake-powered laptops in for review (the initial notebooks – some 20 of them – are expected to debut at the end of 2020).
When they emerge further down the line, 8-core Tiger Lake models could pose quite a threat to AMD’s Ryzen 4000 mobile chips which started appearing in laptops earlier this year (making for some very compelling notebook offerings themselves).
Source: techradar.com