The slow pace of data from Intel’s own Tiger Lake processors turned into a real flood recently as the company shared information about the first Salvo of 10nm superfin chips, but one detail is missing: no official release of chips with four more cores. This has changed in a way that has been steadily declining, as Boyd Phelps Medium, including Intel, revealed in a blog post that the company will soon introduce an eight-core model:
“We added 3 MB of non-included last-level-cache (LLC) per slice. A single core working pressure 4-core die can have access to 12MB LLC or up to 24MB 8-core die configuration (more on 8-core products at a later date).“
Intel claims that it can beat AMD’s eight-core Renoir chips by some performance criteria already due to its four-core Tiger Lake models, their 10nm superfin process, Willow Cove Core and Iris XE graphics. If Intel’s performance estimates for its quad-core models are correct, the eight-core Tiger Lake models could prove highly competitive against AMD’s existing Raizen mobile ‘Renoir’ lineup, possibly surpassing the lead in threaded applications. We didn’t see individual third-party verification of quad-core Tiger Lake chips in the review, but AMD’s upcoming Zen3 “Season” APUs are now crucial because AMD is looking at eight-core Tiger Lake models to maintain its effectiveness in the laptop market.
While the current dual and quad-core Tiger Lake chips only address the 7 to 28W segment, the larger eight-core Tiger Lake-H processor will probably definitely tackle the top moons in the performance market over the 45W model (~ 65W top) with the H-Series Core i9. And for the i7 model.
We won’t go into the full technical details of Tiger Lake, we have all those resources here in one place, but Intel’s plans for eight-core Tiger Lake models are not entirely surprising. Intel’s current 10th-Zen lineup has a 10nm Ice Lake processor that addresses the IGPU gaming market with four cores, while the 14nm Comet Lake processor puts the work pressure on high-performance productivity. However, Intel told us during its Tiger Lake briefing that all of its future laptop chips will come with a 10nm superfin (or better) process, meaning there will be no split product stacks for the company’s 11th-gen lineup.
Many of Intel’s previous limitations on Ice Lake models stemmed from low clock frequencies and poor yields, conspiring to limit both performance and core numbers – Intel’s best 10nm effort still makes quad-core chips for laptops. Intel’s new 10nm Superfin process has fixed clock speed problems, we’ve increased the base and amplification frequencies by 700 MHz and the emergence of eight core models suggests that the error rates are lower, and as a result the yield is over, allowing Intel to punch up to eight core 10nm laptops. .
Intel has no plans to bring Tiger Lake to the lineup of desktop chips, but we’ve already seen the first new Tiger Lake NUC rise from ASRK. Naturally, eight-core Tiger Lake models will do their job in the NUC lineups. Given their pairing with the X graphics engine, they can do a good performance punch packing for compact desktop PCs.
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