Intel Talks Tiger Lake and Xe for gamers in 2021

During a virtual presentation intel held its Architecture Day 2020, the company revealed some new details about the upcoming notebook processors of the Tiger Lake series. And also the new Xe graphics processors.

Intel's Tiger Lake yells loudly: 10nm SuperFin and SuperMIM technologies, Willow Cove Cores, Xe Graphics, support for LPDDDR5. Intel is depending heavily on Tiger Lake processors, which will formally debut in September (U models) for Ultrabooks and similar mainstream devices. AMD is currently not only exerting pressure on the desktop segment, but also on the notebook market, and imminent growth in ARM devices is casting its shadow. Intel's classic 14-nanometer chips have passed their zenith and the company is now focusing on the second generation of 10-nanometer production. At its own Architecture Day, the processor company is optimistic and presented the basis of the new notebook chips with Willow Cove and Xe-LP. They are said to provide big improvements in terms of CPU and GPU performance. Intel adopts new SuperFin transistors in the eleventh generation of its Core processors. The new transistor construction should offer a performance increase that is comparable to a full-fledged node improvement. SuperFin enables significantly higher clock rates with the same voltage. Alternatively, identical clock rates to the previous Ice Lake U-Chips (first 10 nm generation) are of course also possible with reduced power consumption. In addition, Willow Cove is a new CPU architecture that replaces Sunny Cove. Among other things, Willow Cove brings a larger L2 cache with it. The increase in IPC is said to be above average compared to Sunny Cove, but Intel will probably not give exact figures until the official Tiger Lake presentation in September. In terms of I / O, Thunderbolt 4, USB 4 and PCIe 4.0 have been confirmed . However, not all processors offer the latter, due to lane limitations in particularly energy-saving models.

Integrated graphics with Xe-LP

With Intel Xe Low Power , the introduction of a brand new graphics unit is also imminent. Intel offers up to 96 execution units for the integrated Xe GPUs, which means an increase of 50 percent compared to the Ice Lakes limit of 64 EUs. Intel demonstrated the graphics performance in smooth Full HD with titles such as Doom Eternal and Battlefield V. This should at least compete with dedicated entry-level graphics chips such as the GTX 1650 Ti. How the GPU performance turns out in reality remains to be seen until the first Tiger Lake notebooks appear, but significantly better performance with the same power consumption can be assumed.

The company also gave an outlook for 2021 . The next CPU architecture called Golden Cove is already imminent there, and Alder Lake is the successor to the Lakefield hybrid chips . The Pentium and Atom processors will also receive a CPU upgrade with Gracemont next year. Tiger Lake-H for high-end notebooks is likely to come in spring 2021. Overall, Intel makes great promises about Tiger Lake. If the processors are actually as good as the company claims, Intel should catch up with AMD's Ryzen 4000 series in the notebook area .

Dedicated graphics swith Xe-HPG: gaming

Xe-HP is the 'scaled out' version of Xe-LP, which consists of a 'tile' of which a maximum of four can be combined as we have been stating for a while now in our news coverage. This multi-core design will become a problem for many games as they will not support it, for  compute applications this is less of a hurdle. The Xe graphics cards will use gddr6 memory to reach an attractive price point - with a heavy heart, said Raja Koduri, Xe-HPG will feature hardware acceleration for real-time ray tracing and would be released next year.

Intel showed off its Xe HP and Xe HPC GPUs with up to 41 TFLOPS for the 4-tile variant. Xe HP is the successor to the Xeon Phi product line, offering high computing power. It will also use Intel's 10nm SuperFin process, however, this will not be available on the graphics card market.