Intel offers a first look at its next-gen Tiger Lake Processors and Xe graphics

Intel’s Architecture Day 2020 took a first look at the company’s upcoming Tiger Lake processors, along with a more detailed example of Intel’s moving forward with building its own GPUs with its upcoming Xe graphics – both of which promise a higher performance and lower energy consumption than ever before.

These new products are a big deal for Intel for a few reasons. Intels have been forced on the defensive in recent years, with increased competition from AMD; their recent 7nm Ryzen 4000 chips are already ahead of Intel’s 10nm Ice Lake chips from a manufacturer’s point of view, and, in many cases, better Intel’s offerings in laptops. Intel is also under pressure from ARM, which is starting to chip in at Intel’s control of large computer space, with large companies such as Microsoft, Samsung, and Apple starting to offer ARM computers.

And of course, Intel recently announced that it would slow down its 7nm chips until at least 2022 – a big hit for its upcoming hardware releases. Intel needs a big profit this fall, to show its partners and consumers why it’s still a force to be reckoned with in the processor world.

The company’s upcoming Tiger Lake chips (expected to be Intel’s 11th Gen Core Processors under the company’s current market scheme) are Intel’s attempts to fight back against its increased competition. It is powered by the company’s new Willow Cove architecture, which is built on a new “SuperFin” transistor that the company promises to offer a generation-type boost that would have offered a full node shift. That’s a big promise to make, but if Tiger Lake can meet that, it could be critical for Intel, given the 7nm delay.

However, the result of the new 10nm SuperFin design is that Intel promises that Tiger Lake chips will offer dramatically better frequency speeds, while also drawing significantly less power. This means that Intel can offer chips that provide great performance boost at the same voltage levels as current Ice Lake chips offer at similar frequency rates, while reducing energy consumption.

Tiger Lake will also support a variety of new I / O standards out of the box, including Thunderbolt 4 and USB4, DDR5 RAM up to 5400MHz (in addition to DDR4 up to 3200MHz and LPDDR4X up to 4767MHz), and PCIe Gen 4.0 (offering speeds of up to 8 GB per second to memory).

Tiger Lake will also be the public debut of Intel’s Xe graphics – specifically the first generation of Intel’s Xe-LP integrated graphics, which will offer a maximum of 96 EU (a 50 percent increase) and promises to deliver a similar increase over the current Gen11 graphics in addition to their 10th Gen Ice Lake chips offer in both improved performance and lower energy consumption.

The Xe-LP graphics will obviously offer major improvements to gaming over Intel’s lineup (especially on devices that are not typically gaming-focused). Intel shows modern AAA games as well PUBG, Roaster, Doom forever, en Battlefield V runs smoothly at 1080p on integrated Xe-LP graphics and found that games that only ran on a 25W system with Gen11 were now available on a 15W system with Xe-LP.

Xe-LP also promises better performance for makers and display performance, with support for up to 8K UHD with HDR10 and Dolby cycling panels, up to 360Hz refresh rates, and up to twice the video encoding and decoding performance.

But Xe-LP is only part of Intel’s graphics strategy. The company has also announced an update to its Xe-HP, the higher-powered version of its graphics architecture, with a demo demonstrating its video coding skills and a 2021 release window promised. Intel announced another graphics microarchitecture: Xe-HPG, which will specifically focus on gaming and perhaps represent Intel’s first launch in actively competing with AMD and Nvidia for gaming-oriented GPUs. Xe-HPG looks to combine aspects of the other Xe architecture and will be able to offer GPU-accelerated ray-tracing as it launches next year.

The company also announced that it has begun production of its DG1 discrete graphics card (based on the same Xe-LP technology seen in Tiger Lake), which is set to ship later this year. That GPU is not really the kind of high-end graphics card you would normally associate with the name. It’s effectively just the integrated GPU that Intel will ship with Tiger Lake offered as an external card, allowing for better cooling. It’s more of a proof-of-concept for Intel’s discrete GPU ambitions (which, as mentioned above, are comprehensive) than the next big thing in graphics.

Finally, Intel has the example of following Wave or its roadmap for 2021. The next for its traditional micro-architecture is its 10nm Golden Cove cores, which promise further performance improvements, AI and 5G optimization and increased security. Golden Cove will be an important part of the newly announced Alder Lake series, which is a performance-focused hybrid chipset that will succeed the recently released Lakefield hybrid chips.

Today’s Lakefield chips take a similar approach to ARM’s BIG.little technology, combining a mix of faster, more power-hungry performance cores with smaller cores for better efficiency. The current single-core Sunny Cove core (the same 10nm architecture on which the 10th Gen Ice Lake chips are based) with four Atom-grade low-power Tremont cores, Alder Lake will combine Golden Cove cores with Gracemont (the next-generation Atom nuclei, set to succeed Tremont) for even better performance and lower energy consumption. That could potentially mean that Alder Lake could come to higher power laptops or even desktops in the future.

And remember: today’s news is just a technical look at Intel’s upcoming hardware. Expect a full reveal of the new Tiger Lake chips (which will have integrated Xe-LP graphics) on September 2nd.