Thursday, April 23rd 2020
Intel Confirms Mid-2020 "Tiger Lake" Launch
Intel earlier today published its Q1 2020 financial results. In its slide deck, the company illustrated many of the facts and numbers detailed in its earnings release, but one item caught our eye: a slide confirms that the company plans to launch its "Tiger Lake" client processor by mid-year (we would place that between June to August, 2020. Intel is quite ambitious about "Tiger Lake," as it forms the microarchitecture behind its most advanced 11th generation Core mobile processors. A slide from a November 2019 investor meet details the key design goals. "Tiger Lake" implements Intel's new "Willow Cove" CPU core design that succeeds "Sunny Cove" cores found inside its "Ice Lake" processors.
"Willow Cove" sees a new cache design, implementation of new transistor optimizations from Intel's 10 nm+ silicon fabrication process, and new security features. Besides "Willow Cove" CPU cores, "Tiger Lake" sees the market debut of the company's ambitious Xe graphics architecture as its iGPU solution. The chip will also support next-generation I/O. Here's hoping Intel is able to step up CPU core-counts with "Tiger Lake." The company was forced to tap into "Comet Lake" for both its 15 W and 45 W markets due to their higher core counts, despite an older CPU core and iGPU architecture than "Ice Lake." In the same slide, Intel mentions that it commenced sampling for "Ice Lake-SP" line of high core-count enterprise processors.
"Willow Cove" sees a new cache design, implementation of new transistor optimizations from Intel's 10 nm+ silicon fabrication process, and new security features. Besides "Willow Cove" CPU cores, "Tiger Lake" sees the market debut of the company's ambitious Xe graphics architecture as its iGPU solution. The chip will also support next-generation I/O. Here's hoping Intel is able to step up CPU core-counts with "Tiger Lake." The company was forced to tap into "Comet Lake" for both its 15 W and 45 W markets due to their higher core counts, despite an older CPU core and iGPU architecture than "Ice Lake." In the same slide, Intel mentions that it commenced sampling for "Ice Lake-SP" line of high core-count enterprise processors.
10 Comments on Intel Confirms Mid-2020 "Tiger Lake" Launch
As mentioned, I don't expect this Skylake architecture to last another refresh since they have pushed the chip above and beyond. For the laptop space where power efficiency is key, their strategy to push for higher clockspeed is starting to rear its ugly head where you need a laptop that is 2x the size of an AMD Renoir chip to provide sufficient cooling. And despite the size of the Intel laptops, they are not able to sustain the fabled 5.3Ghz, clearly when you look at some of the reviews where its higher clockspeed is not bringing the expected benefits. I suspect the 10nm from Intel is only a marginal improvement (instead of a generational leap) over the 14nm as Intel had to make compromises to get it to work. After all Bob already said they will release 10nm chips, and they will have to get it out of the market, and do or die they will have to get it out in whatever shape or form.
Intel have developed Y, U, H and S variants of Tiger Lake as evident in their drivers, but this doesn't guarantee all of them make it to volume production.
But given their recent track record, that probably won't happen till the "Lake" is all dryed up, which should occur ~2036 or so....:roll:..:cry:..:laugh: