Intel’s 11th-Gen Tiger Lake CPUs to Make Notebooks Thinner Yet More Powerful

Intel officially announced its new 11th-Gen Core processor family for thin and light notebooks at a digital event. The chipmaker gave away technical details of the new architecture last month, and it has now officially announced the range of CPUs that we can expect on notebooks arriving in late 2020. The company also announced its redesigned logo and a new Intel Evo branding for the Project Athena initiative.

The new 11th-Gen Tiger Lake CPUs include the U-series and Y-series that will be targeting thin and light notebooks. There are a total of nine new processor options with the Core i7-1185G7 being the most powerful chipset, offering base clock speeds of 3.0GHz, a single-core turbo boost of up to 4.8GHz, and an all-core boost of up to 4.3GHz. It also comes with Intel’s Iris Xe integrated graphics. The new 11th-Gen series continues to make use of the 10nm node which is similar to the current 10th-Gen Ice Lake. However, it comes with the new ‘Willow Core’ architecture with a new 10nm SuperFin design that should offer better speeds at lower power consumption.

Tiger Lake also comes with support for Wi-Fi 6, USB 4.0, Thunderbolt 4, and most importantly, the PCIe 4.0 interface for internal storage and DDR5 RAM. This essentially means faster read and write speeds when consumers use the newer PCIe 4.0 SSDs and the ability to use four 4K HDR displays at the same time thanks to Thunderbolt 4.0. There is also support for Dolby Vision and the new AV1 codec for enhanced media performance.

PC makers including Dell, Acer, Lenovo, HP, Samsung, Asus, and others are expected to introduce about 50 products with the new 11th-Gen Core processors around the world during the holiday season with a total of 150 models in the pipeline.

Intel also announced a new Project Athena certification standard called “Intel Evo” that will offer much higher requirements. Expect a minimum of nine hours of real-world usage on a single charge , fast charging, Wi-Fi 6, Thunderbolt 4, and “less than a second” system wake time. Essentially, if you see the new Intel Evo logo, then you can expect a high-quality experience on the machine. Intel has confirmed that around 20 Evo-verified products should be available later this year.