We continue to receive new information with details on the 11th generation of the Core Tiger Lake SoC, which will be released later this year for laptops.
Intel Tiger Lake, new details about Willow Cove and more
These chips will be based on the 10nm SuperFin node, which is more or less equivalent to the second generation 10nm node because it uses a newly designed transistor, and on the capacitor, the design described as SuperMIM capacitors and new FinFET transistors.
Called System-on-Chip (SoC), Intel Tiger Lake Willow Cove has CPU cores paired with Xe LP iGPU as its two main components that should provide a significant performance boost.
Willow Cove is similar in design to Sunny Cove in Ice Lake, but with significant cache improvements, with an increase in L2 cache to 1.25 MB (from 512 KB) and an increase in L3 cache to 12 MB shared by four cores in the Tiger Lake SoC. The Willow Cove CPU cores will also run at a significantly higher clock speed, primarily due to the 10nm SuperFin.
With an integrated memory controller, Tiger Lake will support up to 128GB of dual-channel memory LP5-5400, DDR4-3200 and LP4x-4267 with bandwidth up to 86GB/s.
The Xe LP as an Intel iGPU Gen2 will bring several improvements, including a two-fold performance increase over the iGPU Gen11 and will be delivered with 96 UEs and up to 16 MB of proprietary L3 cache. We’ve written about the iGPU Xe LP before, and when it comes to the multimedia side and display engine, you get double the performance with 8K/60FPS playback capability for media encoding/decoding.
You get support for AV1 hardware decoding, HEVC display content-encoding, HDR playback acceleration, and Dolby Vision. It also supports a 360 Hz refresh rate with VESA Adaptive Sync.
Intel’s Tiger Lake also supports Thunderbolt 4 and USB4 as well as PCIe 4.0 with 4 channels for the NVMe M.2 slot.
Intel’s Tiger Lake will come out in 2020 in some interesting laptops, and it will be interesting to see how well it expands into other form factors and markets in the future.