This week is shaping up to be an interesting week for the computing world. On Tuesday, Nvidia will unveil its RTX 3000 series graphics cards. And for those looking for a new ultra-portable laptop, Intel will reportedly announce its new mobile Tiger Lake chips on Wednesday.
Thanks to some entries in Geekbench 5, we have a pretty good idea of what to expect in terms of performance. And while this is only two chips, if we see similar improvements across the board, this could be a huge leap forward in graphics performance in slimmer, lighter laptops.
The first chip in question is the Intel Core i7-1185G7 (List 1, List 2), perhaps the most powerful Tiger Lake CPU available, on par with the Core i7 1065G7, the best PC mobile chip the company currently offers. With a base frequency of 2.99 GHz, it has a boost performance of 4.8 GHz compared to Ice Lake's 1.3 GHz and 3.9 GHz.
Not surprisingly, the upgrade from Iris Plus to Intel Xe also significantly improves the performance of the internal GPU: the Intel Xe-based chip has up to 96 execution units (EU) and a maximum GPU clock speed of 1.55GHz. [The Core i7 1068NG7 has a base of 2.3 GHz and a boost of 4.1 GHz, but is exclusive to Apple MacBooks and does not benefit from the new Intel Xe GPU.
Next on the list is the Intel Core i5-1135G7, which is naturally weaker in performance, but still a good leap ahead of the Ice Lake i5 and i7. Clock speeds of 2.4 GHz and 4.2 GHz comfortably outperform the Ice Lake Core it-1035G7 at 1.2 GHz and 3.7 GHz, respectively. Once again, Intel Xe Graphics also provides a GPU boost, with 80EUs over 64 on the Iris Plus and a maximum graphics frequency of 1.3GHz, up from 1.05Ghz on the previous model.
Of course, these specs have not yet been officially confirmed, but if the benchmark data proves to be truly accurate, the Tiger Lake chip could be a giant leap forward for integrated graphics in laptops. And as AMD's Ryzen CPUs continue to impress in laptops like the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, Tiger Lake could give Intel a powerful weapon against its ever-rising rivals.
Intel's Iris Plus graphics offered a noticeable increase in GPU power over Intel UHD graphics, but Tiger Lake is expected to offer twice the improvement of Iris Plus. That does not mean that Tiger Lake chips will make dedicated graphics cards redundant in gaming laptops. However, it may mean that it will provide adequate 1080p gaming performance in laptops that are normally used for more mundane computing tasks.
We have seen footage of laptops with Tiger Lake running Battlefield V at smooth frame rates. The idea of being able to enjoy the latest games on an upcoming laptop on the go, say, on a boring train trip, is quite appealing.
We can expect to see Tiger Lake chips in upcoming laptops like Microsoft's Surface Laptop 4 this fall.
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