This coming week is going to be an interesting one for the computing world. On Tuesday, Nvidia will unveil its RTX 3000 series graphics cards. And for those in the market for a new ultraportable laptop, Intel will reportedly launch its new mobile Tiger Lake chips on Wednesday.
Thanks to a couple of Geekbench 5 entries, we have a pretty good idea of what to expect in terms of performance. And while this is just two chips, if similar gains are seen across the board, this could be a giant leap forward in graphical performance in slim and light laptops.
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The first chip in question is the Intel Core i7-1185G7 (listing 1, listing 2) and it’s likely the most powerful Tiger Lake CPU available, which would make it equivalent to the best PC mobile chip the company currently offers: the Core i7 1065G7. And the new chip leaves the old in the dust, with a base frequency of 2.99GHz and boosted performance of 4.8GHz to the Ice Lake’s 1.3GHz and 3.9GHz.
Unsurprisingly, given the upgrade from Iris Plus to Intel Xe, built-in GPU performance also gets a significant shot in the arm. The Intel Xe based chip gets up to 96 execution units (EUs) and a max GPU clock speed of 1.55GHz to the Iris Plus’ 64 EUs and 1.1GHz.
To be entirely fair to the Ice Lake chips, there is one version that does put up more of a fight: the Core i7 1068NG7, which has a 2.3GHz base and 4.1GHz boost — but it’s exclusive to Apple MacBooks, and doesn’t benefit from the new Intel Xe GPU.
Next up is a listing for the Intel Core i5-1135G7 which, unsurprisingly, offers weaker performance, but still provides a hearty leap on its Ice Lake i5 and even i7 counterparts. With clock speeds of 2.4GHz and 4.2GHz boosted, it comfortably beats the Ice Lake Core it-1035G7 which comes in at 1.2GHz and 3.7GHz respectively. Once again, Intel Xe graphics also provides a GPU boost: 80 EUs, over the Iris Plus’ 64, with a max graphics frequency of 1.3GHz to 1.05Ghz of its predecessor.
None of these specs are officially confirmed yet, of course, but if the benchmark data does indeed prove to be accurate, then the Tiger Lake chips could be a significant leap forward for integrated graphics in laptops. And with AMD's Ryzen CPUs continuing to impress in laptops such as the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, Tiger Lake could give Intel a powerful weapon against its constantly rising rival.
Intel's Iris Plus graphics delivered a noticeable hike in GPU power over Intel UHD graphics, but Tiger Lake is expected to deliver a two times boost over Iris Plus. Now that doesn't mean Tiger Lake chips will render dedicated graphics cards in gaming laptop redundant. But it could mean the delivery of proper 1080p gaming performance in laptops you'd usually use for more mundane computing tasks.
We've seen a clip of a Tiger Lake-powered laptop running Battlefield V at a smooth frame rate. So the idea of some proper modern gaming on upcoming laptops on the go — say a on a dull train journey — is pretty tantalizing.
We can expect to see the Tiger Lake chips in upcoming laptops like the Microsoft Surface Laptop 4 this fall.
