Intel’s Tiger Lake Launch Date Nears: New Transistor Promises Significant Clock Speed Improvements

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    Intel is all set for the launch of its next-gen Tiger Lake CPUs. The upcoming CPUs are said to offer massive improvements over their predecessor, the current-gen Ice Lake CPUs.

    The blue processor giant recently revealed more details about the next-gen Intel Tiger Lake CPUs which would apparently offer a new architecture, faster clock speed, latest I/O technology, integration of their upcoming Xe cores, and many more exciting improvements. The next-gen CPUs would also feature major improvements in terms of power consumption and are going to use their brand new SuperFIN transistors. This would prove to be a major development in Intel’s race against AMD to dominate the tech industry.

    Intel’s Competiton with AMD: Can Tiger Lake Give The Edge?

    Intel has been in a competition with AMD for a very long time to produce the best processors for the industry. Intel has long dominated the processor market however, form some time now they are struggling to keep up with AMD. The major reason is the AMD 7nm process node CPUs. Intel was relying on the 14nm node processor for some-time now while they dominated the mobile processor market. They made some incremental improvements on the 14nm nodes slowing down their pace to move on to the next generation. Eventually, they moved on to the 10nm node processors using them in the current-gen Ice Lake CUPs.

    Intel Tiger Lake 10nm processors
    Intel Tiger Lake

    This slow development of Intel processors left an opening for AMD to take the lead. Finally, AMD shifted to a 7nm node processor when they introduced their Ryzen 9 CPUs. This gave AMD a competitive edge over Intel as they were still stuck with the 14nm+ node and 10nm node processors. However, the new upcoming Tiger Lake processors although featuring 10nm process node might prove to be Intel’s damsel in distress. They use a new transistor technology which can be used to provide significant improvements in clock speed.

    The New Transistor: SuperFIN

    Intel on August 11, 2020, held their Architecture Day and also revealed their new upcoming transistor technology, the SuperFIN. This new transistor is said to provide massive improvement in clocking speed. It allegedly has an intranode performance of gain of up to 17.5% than the previous-generation. However, these results are in comparison to the vanilla 10nm node processors.

    Intel SuperFIN Transistor
    Intel SuperFIN Transistor

    According to Raja Koduri, Intel’s Vice President, Chief Architect, the various nomenclature of naming their improvement of previous nodes as “++” was very confusing. However, this new transistor would just be called SuperFIN clearing all the confusion. This would allow Tiger Lake CPUs which would be featuring Willow Cove cores, to reach a clocking speed of around 5GHz. This would be a drastic improvement as compared to the present-given Ice Lake CPUs.

    Other Major Improvements and Features of Tiger Lake CPUs

    The release date of the Tiger Lake CPUs is expected to be 2nd September 2020. This during the holiday seasons, a perfect time to launch a new product. Tiger Lake CUPS is set to offer one of the most latest technologies in the market. The Tiger Lake CPUs would be featuring Willow Cove cores. These new cores are major improvements to the previous-gen Sunny Cove cores. In terms of the power-frequency curve, the Willow Cove CPUs seem to reach 5GHz while the Sunny Cove cores were only able to reach 4GHz.

    Intel Tiger Lake Other Features
    Intel Tiger Lake CPUs featuring Thunderbolt 4

    The blue-tech giant would also include their latest Xe integrated GPU architecture for the gamers. The Tiger Lake CPU would feature Xe LP derivative which includes around 96 EUs. Boyd Phelps, Vice President, Intel’s Client Engineering Group said that the Xe GPUs would run a lot faster than the previous generation used in Ice Lake CPUs. Intel Tiger Lake would also be featuring the latest in port technologies, Thunderbolt 4 and USB4. They have also improved the CPU utilization by optimizing and improving the Gaussian Neural Accelerator. Intel would also be using the PCI Express Gen 4 for the PCIe 4.0 in their Tiger Lake CPUs. The PCIe 4.0 lines would directly be connected to the CPUs which would reduce the latency of exchange by around 100ns. However, he did not reveal the number of PCI lanes that would be featured on the Tiger Lake CPUs.

    With all of these significant improvements and latest technologies, Intel’s Tiger Lake CPUs are about to hit the market soon. The tech giant promised to ship-out around 50 Tiger Lake featuring notebooks during the holiday season. It is also said that they are holding back more CPUs than they promised to avoid the risk of shortage. It’s safe to say that the upcoming Tiger Lake CPUs look very promising for Intel. However, the actual performance and benchmarks would be the final verdict on its performance after it finally hits the market.

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