In August, Intel ran one of its rare Architecture Days where the company went into some detail about its upcoming Tiger Lake processor. This included target markets, core counts, graphics counts, a look into some of the new acceleration features, and a promise of a product launch later in the year. That product launch is now here, and Intel is providing Tiger Lake with speeds and feeds, providing detail and expected benchmark performance for Intel’s next generation of notebook-class devices.
A whole slew of laptops using Tiger Lake processors have also been announced today, as well as something called “Intel Evo“, which is a set of specifications OEMs can adhere to for especially high-end ultrabooks (sadly, Evo is entirely Windows-focused, and zero work has been done for other operating systems, such as Linux).
If it is a whole slew of macbookairalikes with no improvements in keyboard and touch pad then I’ll pass.
Nice but I want benchmarks. I am curious about Xe graphics part.
ronaldst,
That’s pretty much my policy: always ignore what the companies say and wait for 3rd party benchmarks. Companies have a tendency of exaggerating their own performance, setting up unfair benchmarks unfairly, cherry pick data, etc.
I would expect much better power consumption over ice lake given the process improvements, naturally. But I won’t accept intel’s performance claims without 3rd party confirmation. I’m eager to see where high end ARM and x86 chips will stand once released to market. The competition has been picking up, which I hope we can all agree is great for consumers!
Oh, I’m also curious about the graphics, I don’t want to be overly optimistic, so I expect it will be mid-range, but nobody knows for sure.
“up to 16GB of RAM”
Boring, I’m always amazed how few laptops don’t allow more.
Is it the price of the Low Profile DDR DIMMs goes up to much ? (and the physical limits of laptop design only allow 2)
I saw someone mention maybe higher capacity needs more power delivery so the components that need to deliver that power would even draw more power even if the RAM wasn’t maxed out.
Lennie,
Maybe. Any given power supply or buck regulator has an efficiency curve as given here:
https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/tps53513.pdf
(I don’t know if this specific regulator is ever used in laptops, it’s just an example).
In general there’s a peak efficiency at a some point which is probably 85-95% efficient, but usually they still have a considerably wide operational range. If you have a “one size fits all” regulator, then engineers have to make a decision about where that peak will lie. If the peak efficiency is optimized for 8GB DIMMs, then 4GB, 16GB, 32GB would be less efficient.
Eyeballing the efficiency chart in the previous link at 1.2V, you might have something like this:
4GB = 87%
8GB = 92%
16GB = 88%
32GB = 80%
But at 4X the current, the 32GB may not be within the max current specs of the regulator., so you’d be looking at more expensive components. For example, by doubling up the regulator, you could get twice the current, but it could be twice the cost and the peak efficiency would be 16GB instead of 8GB.
Edit: BTW cloudflare’s DNS went offline again, making DNS requests for osnews.com fail for me this morning. I’m surprised that for a company that stakes it’s whole reputation on reliability and scalability, their service has been crap.
Originally was psyched about new macbooks getting these chips. Now I’m not sure. Will see about the graphics and maybe give some thought to a Dell or Lenovo Linux laptop in the future.. Intel support for Linux graphics has always been top-notch.