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Intel releases new versions of its Core laptop processors every year, and most years the company tends to talk about how faster they are than the previous generation. But Wednesday’s launch of its newest silicon, the 11th-generation “Tiger Lake” chips, is different. Intel’s main claim with Tiger Lake is not that it is faster than the 10th-gen “Ice Lake” family (although it is), but rather that it is faster than AMD’s latest Ryzen laptop processors.
Why the change of Intel, deigning to mention the silicon competitor of its archrival? The obvious answer is that the latest “Renoir” chips from the Ryzen 4000 series have outperformed Ice Lake in raw performance in classic benchmarks since the first Renoir laptops went on sale earlier this year. So regaining the lead is important, although we’ll have to take Intel’s word for it, as there are no Tiger Lake laptops available for independent testing yet.
Credit: Asus
But the more interesting answer is that persistent delays in Intel’s silicon research, development, and manufacturing that helped AMD gain a head start in the first place, have led Intel to explore other ways to make its processors faster than they are not dependent on pure silicon muscle enhancements. Perhaps the most significant of these methods is adding artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, which are responsible for much of what supports Intel’s claim that Tiger Lake is once again the best-performing family of processors for slim laptops. and light.
Accelerating those crops and blurs
Enabling AI capabilities on a PC or Mac is a team effort involving the chip maker, computer maker, and developer of the application that will benefit from AI. In the case of Tiger Lake, Intel has added support and optimizations for numerous AI platforms that manufacturers and developers can use to accelerate the performance of their applications.
With cryptic names like Open Vino, Gaussian & Neural Accelerator, and Deep Learning Boost, Tiger Lake’s AI suite is difficult for non-techies to understand. And much of it is based on improvements to technologies already available in Ice Lake and previous generations. But the performance implications are clear: Tiger Lake’s AI achievements accelerate common workflows even when using the same or less compute resources and battery power as previous generations and AMD competitors, Intel says.
The best example of Tiger Lake’s AI advantage is retouching images and videos after they have been shot. Take CyberDirector’s PowerDirector Video Editing Pack, which now offers several AI-assisted style packs. They can add a bit of French Impressionist flair (or another artistic period of their choosing) to their videos. When we reviewed CyberDirector last year using an older Asus PC with a 6th gen Core i7, a 16 second clip took 2 minutes to transform. That’s a good amount of time we spend playing with our thumbs.
Credit: PCMag
Because PowerDirector uses Open Vino, you can take advantage of Tiger Lake’s artificial intelligence capabilities to dramatically speed up that process. A Tiger Lake Core i7 can now apply that AI style effect eleven times faster than a comparable Renoir Ryzen 7. Much of the footage people are editing is much longer than our 16-second test clip, which can translate to some really useful speedups for prosumers and professional editors.
Credit: Intel
The PowerDirector example also helps explain why Intel is comparing the performance of Tiger Lake to Renoir instead of Ice Lake: Tiger Lake is less than 3 times faster than Ice Lake in the CyberDirector example, offering a still significant relative advantage. , but much less someone who just bought a new laptop with Intel technology.
With all that AI, lots of caveats
In fact, there are many more caveats when you take a close look at other AI examples Intel has published to promote Tiger Lake’s strengths. One of the most popular among professionals and casual users is the relatively new Content Aware filter and effects in Adobe Photoshop. They use the Adobe Sensei AI suite, which is based on Open Vino. In Intel’s internal tests, the Tiger Lake Core i7 was again faster than the Renoir Ryzen 7, but only by 10 percent.
Even more significant, the Ice Lake Core i7 was actually 10 percent slower than Ryzen 7. Why is it so important? It suggests that even without any of Intel’s AI features, Renoir chips are still faster based solely on their superior silicon architecture. (Renoir uses a 7-nanometer architecture, while Intel has said its 7-nm architecture won’t be ready for another year, at least.)
Other image and video AI workflows that Intel demonstrated at the Tiger Lake launch on Wednesday offer similarly significant gains over comparable Renoir processors. They include 4.5x acceleration with Gigapixel AI from Topas Labs, and 1.9x improvement on Photo Tagger from Nero.
It bears repeating that independent Tiger Lake performance tests are not yet available. Right now, we are taking Intel’s internal testing at face value. It’s also worth mentioning that while AMD doesn’t have the robust AI ecosystem that Intel has cultivated both internally and with partners like Adobe and CyberDirector, Renoir processors have many AI capabilities of their own. They mostly involve things like predictive algorithms that improve performance by directing apps and games down the most efficient paths within the processor.
Credit: Intel
Still, Intel’s Tiger Lake enhancements are clear evidence that making future laptops faster isn’t just about who has the most advanced silicon. AMD might have surpassed Intel in terms of processor architecture, but artificially intelligent hardware and software is potentially more important in determining the performance of the workflows that PC users rely on the most. We’ll be interested to see how that plays out in the real world once Tiger Lake-based laptops start arriving in PC labs in the coming weeks and months.
