Intel's slow trickle of information on its Tiger Lake processors recently turned into a veritable flood as the company shared information about its first salvo of 10nm SuperFin chips, but one detail was missing: Any official disclosures of chips with more than four cores. That changed in a decidedly low-key way, as a new blog post from Intel fellow Boyd Phelps on Medium revealed that the company would reveal eight-core models soon, saying:
"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)."
Intel claims that it's four-core Tiger Lake models, by virtue of their 10nm SuperFin Process, Willow Cove Cores, and Iris XE graphics can already tackle AMD's eight-core Renoir chips in performance benchmarks. Still, we've yet to see independent third-party verification in reviews. If Intel's performance projections are accurate, the eight-core Tiger Lake models could prove to be exceedingly competitive against AMD's existing Ryzen Mobile 'Renoir' lineup, possibly even wresting away the lead in threaded applications. That will make AMD's upcoming Zen 3 "Cezanne" APUs all the more important as the company looks to keep the performance advantage in the laptop market.
The current dual- and quad-core Tiger Lake chips only address the 7 to 28W segment, while larger Tiger Lake-H processors would obviously tackle the upper echelons of the performance market, possibly stretching up to 45W models (~65W peak) for H-series Core i9 and i7 models.
We won't go into Tiger Lake's full technical details, we have all those resources in one place here, but Intel's plans for eight-core Tiger Lake models aren't entirely surprising. Intel's current 10th-gen lineup includes 10nm Ice Lake processors that address the iGPU gaming market with up to four cores, while the 14nm Comet Lake processors slot in for high-performance productivity workloads. However, Intel told us during its Tiger Lake briefings that all of its future laptop chips will come with the 10nm SuperFin (or better) process, meaning the company won't have a split product stack for its 11th-gen lineup.
Much of Intel's previous limitations on its Ice Lake models stemmed from the low clock frequencies and poor yields, both of which conspired to limit performance and core counts - Intel's best 10nm efforts thus far have resulted in quad-core chips for laptops. Intel's new 10nm SuperFin process has corrected the clock speed issues, we see up to a 700 MHz increase to base and boost frequencies, and the emergence of eight core models imply that defect rates are lower, and thus yields are up, allowing Intel to punch out 10nm laptop chips with up to eight cores.
Intel has no plans to bring Tiger Lake to its lineup of desktop chips, but we have already seen the first new Tiger Lake NUCs emerge from ASRock. Naturally, eight-core models will also work their way into the NUC lineups. Given their pairing with the Xe graphics engine, they could prove to pack a decent performance punch for compact desktop PCs.
The Link LonkSeptember 14, 2020 at 03:24AM
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Intel Makes it Official: Eight Core Tiger Lake Chips Coming - Tom's Hardware
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