Intel's new 11th Gen Tiger Lake-H CPUs offer better performance.
Intel has been shipping the 35W quad-core CPUs for the ultraportable gaming laptops for over a month now. The Tiger Lake-H35 CPU was good enough but was not enough to feed the thrust of hardcore gamers. With the new full-blown Tige Lake-H lineup, the company aims to offer a lot more.
The new lineup of CPUs includes the Intel 11th Gen Core i9-11980HK, i9-11900H, i7-11800H, i5-11400H and the i5-11260H. While the i9-11980HK is a fully unlocked chipset, some of the others are partially unlocked. With these new CPUs, the company is not only competing against the Ryzen 5000 series chipsets but also offering a great overall user experience. Here’s why your next gaming laptop should have one of these Tiger Lake-H chipsets.
The new CPU models explained
The latest flagship laptop processor from the house of Intel is the i9-11980HK, which is an 8C/16T 65W chip that can boost up to 5Ghz on two cores and hit up to 4.5Ghz on all eight cores. It is also a fully unlocked CPU, which means if your OEM allows, you can go ahead and overclock the CPU for even better performance.Just below the Core i9-11980HK sits the i9-11900H, which also brings in 8 cores and 16 threads to the table. It could be one of the more popular options once we start seeing brands with new Tiger Lake-H powered laptops. Unlike the 11980HK, this one can boost only up to 4.9Ghz on two cores and up to 4.6Ghz on all eight cores. It is also worth noting that only the two i9 brothers here will support Intel Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 using which users can squeeze some extra power.
Here's a detailed comparison.
Moving further, there is the Intel Core i7-11800H CPU, which on paper, looks to be only 8-9% slower than the 11980HK making it the sweet spot in the new Intel lineup.
An interesting thing to note here is that the aforementioned CPUs come with 24M of L3 cache, which is more than what is available on the desktop i7 CPUs and this should allow for much higher performance in most applications.
Intel Core i5 is available in two flavours, 11400H and 11260H, both of which are 8C/16T CPUs. Unlike the i7 and i9 models in the H-series, the i5 CPUs get only 12M of L3 cache. While the 11400H can boost up to 4.5Ghz on two cores, the 11260H can only hit a maximum of 4.4Ghz on two cores.
A new approach
The new Intel chipsets come with a 10nm architecture making them more efficient than the Comet Lake CPUs. Alongside this, the new processors get the Willow cove architecture and the new Xe Graphics. The new set of processors come with up to an 8core/16threads configuration and offer up to 5Ghz on multiple cores.
These new processors also bring PCIe Gen 4.0 with 20 lanes, support for overclocking on some SKUs, WiFi 6/6E and ThunderBolt 4. They also add support for 360Hz FullHD panels as well as 120Hz 4K panels.
PCIe Gen 4
Intel has added plenty of new features to the new lineup of chipsets.
With the new Tiger Lake-H series, Intel has moved completely towards the PCIe Gen 4 architecture. These processors get 20 lanes of PCIe Gen 4, out of which, 8 have already been assigned to a discrete GPU. The other 12 lanes can be used for high-speed storage even in RAID configuration. This is a pretty big leap as the latest Ryzen mobile CPUs are currently using PCIe Gen 3. This shows that Intel is committed to offering a better experience to hardcore gamers.
Besides this, the new Intel CPUs also get 24 lanes of PCIe Gen 3. However, it will be up to the laptop manufacturer how they decide to take advantage of all these 44 PCIe lanes. Intel claims that if the laptop manufacturer ships the laptop only with one PCIe NVMe SSD, the new chipsets can allow for 80 percent higher bandwidth and 75 percent faster access times compared to the Comet Lake CPUs.
ThunderBolt 4, Wi-Fi 6E for faster connectivity
Intel's new Tiger Lake-H laptop processors also bring support for ThunderBolt 4. With the help of ThunderBolt 4, you can not only connect 4K monitors but also choose to upgrade your laptop's graphics power using an external GPU.
The new Intel processors even get the new Wi-Fi 6E upgrade that uses the 6GHz wireless spectrum. With the help of Wi-Fi 6E, one can achieve lesser interference, more speed as well as lower latency.
Benchmarks look promsinig
Intel Tiger Lake-H laptop CPUs offer better gaming performance when compared to the last-gen processors.
As the new Intel Tiger Lake-H based laptops are yet to be made available, we have to look at the benchmarks and comparisons provided by Intel. According to the benchmarks, the all-new Core i9-11980HK provides a significant performance boost when compared to last year’s Core i9-10980HK.
In Far Cry: New Dawn, the chipset brings 5% improvement over the last-gen CPU. Similarly, Hitman 3 offers a 6% improvement, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege offer 11% improvement, Grid 2019 offers a 15% improvement, Total War: Three Kingdoms offers an 11% improvement, Troy: A Total War Saga: Siege gets a 14% improvement, and War Thunder gets a 21% improvement.
With such benchmarks, the new Intel chipsets look to be really promising and thus you should wait for the new Tiger Lake-H series laptops if you are a hardcore gamer.
