Intel announced the 11th generation of Tiger Lake CPUs, available on laptops this fall

Intel officially announced the first Tiger Lake processors of the eleventh generation for laptops, which will feature the company’s new integrated Xe graphics, support for Thunderbolt 4, Wi-Fi 6, and a big jump in performance and battery life compared to the previous Ice Lake chips. The company claims its new 11th-generation lineup offers the “best processor for thin and light laptops”.

Intel is launching nine new 11th-generation designs for both the U-Series (which Intel now refers to as UP3) and the Y-Class chipset (also known as UP4), led by the Core i7-1185G7, which delivers base speeds of 3.0GHz, single-turbo boost Core maximum up to 4.8 GHz, increase up to 4.3 GHz max. It also features the most powerful version of Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics, with 96 controllers and a maximum graphics speed of 1.35GHz.

The company already previewed the new chips at its Architecture Day 2020 event earlier this year. The new 11th-generation cluster is still based on a 10nm node, similar to the current 10th-generation Ice Lake models, but has been upgraded to Willow Core architecture with a new “10nm SuperFin design” that Intel says will deliver better speeds at lower power consumption.

Intel isn’t very specific about what these increases will be, but it promises that the new chips will provide 20 percent faster speeds for everyday “office productivity” tasks, along with a similar 20 percent increase in “system” power level, which means it produces more. From an extra hour of battery life to things like streaming video.

Intel is betting heavily on new integrated Xe graphics, which promise to deliver up to twice the graphics performance, and which Intel says will provide more substantial benefits than just an increase in the number of raw cores (an area that, coincidentally, AMD currently leads Intel in.) A demo showcased during Intel’s announcement showed the 11th Gen chipset offering similar or better graphics performance than the 10th Gen chip simultaneously working with the Nvidia MX350 GPU. (Aside, you’ll need Intel’s new i5 or i7 chips to get Xe graphics – the Core i3 models for both the U-lineup and the Y series will only offer Intel UHD graphics.)

Also new is support for 8K HDR displays, along with the option to use up to four 4K HDR displays simultaneously. There are also improvements to the built-in AI engine, which Intel says will offer specific improvements to video calls (such as background blurring) – tasks that ARM-based computers like the Surface Pro X previously excelled at.

Besides the new chips, Intel is introducing for the first time a new version of its Athena Project Certification standard called “Intel Evo”. Evo will have higher requirements, including ensuring that your laptop will provide more than nine hours of “real” use on a single charge (for 1080p systems), fast charging (for four hours of charging in 30 minutes), and Wi-Fi. 6 and Thunderbolt 4, activating the system in “less than a second”. The idea is that users should be able to expect a quality machine when they see the Evo logo foolproof. Intel says more than 20 Evo-verified designs will be available later this year.

Expect to see new chips on a variety of systems in the coming days and weeks, with Intel promising over 150 designs with 11th-generation Intel Core processors from companies such as Acer, Asus, Dell, Dynabook, HP, Lenovo, LG, MSI, Razr and Samsung. . The first of these products have already been announced, such as the Samsung Galaxy Book Flex 5G, the updated Swift 5 and Swift 3 from Acer, and the latest ZenBooks from Asus, with release dates as early as this fall.