No 7-nanometer process? No problem! Intel is hyping up the company’s upcoming "Tiger Lake" processors by claiming they’ll offer a generational leap in performance.
The laptop-bound mobile processors won’t launch until Sept. 2. In the meantime, however, Intel is previewing advancements it has made to its 10nm manufacturing process. As revealed in an earnings call late last month, its 7nm technology has been delayed until late 2022 or early 2023.
The holdup has been raising serious questions about how the chip maker will remain competitive with AMD, whose CPU fortunes have been rising over the past year with its successful launch of 7nm technology across desktop and laptop platforms. But according to Intel, even without the process-node bump, the 10nm Tiger Lake processors are poised to offer impressive performance gains akin to a “full-node transition.”
Spotting SuperFins in 'Willow Cove'
To pull this off, Intel said it redesigned the company’s FinFet transistors—the building blocks of modern PC microprocessors—to carry more electrical current through the channel and at a faster rate. The chip maker also improved the “MIM capacitor,” which stores the electrical charge, increasing its capacity by five times using the same footprint. Taking advantage of these architectural upgrades, the Tiger Lake chips can offer better performance and energy efficiency than last year’s 10nm "Ice Lake" chips.
(Credit: Intel)
“The combined power of these innovations enables us to deliver a dramatic process performance boost that makes it the largest single node enhancement in Intel history,” said Ruth Brain, the company’s director for interconnect technology, at a presentation from Intel's "Architecture Day" event held earlier this week.
The improvement is prompting the chipmaker to dub the new technology “10nm SuperFin.” In the Tiger Lake chips, Intel is using the manufacturing process to implement the “Willow Cove” CPU microarchitecture, which will deliver a “more than generational increase in CPU performance,” the company claimed in a statement.
Compared with Ice Lake’s architecture, dubbed “Sunny Cove,” the new Willow Cove can produce higher clock speeds while drawing the same amount of power, according to Intel’s presentation to the press. Conversely, Willow Cove can reach the higher frequency speeds on Sunny Cove while using only half the voltage.
(Credit: Intel)
One Early Reveal: Memory Bandwidth
Another improvement is to Tiger Lake’s memory bandwidth, which can now scale up to 86GBps. The chips will also support RAM for DDR4-3200, LPDDR4X, and upcoming LPDDR5 technologies.
That all said, Intel didn’t reveal exact specs for the Willow Cove architecture or products based on it. The company is also refraining from providing performance benchmarks for the Tiger Lake processors until Sept. 2, when the company will hold an event to officially launch these new chips.
Other enhancements to Tiger Lake include a more powerful integrated graphics solution, now called Intel Xe LP, which should enable you to play at least some AAA PC games at 1080p, without dialing down the graphics settings. The processors are also going to support faster AI-driven processing, as well as integrate support for Thunderbolt 4 connectivity.
Further Reading
- Intel to Launch 'Xe HPG' PC Gaming Graphics Cards in 2021, Using Outside Foundry
- Intel Is Releasing 'Avengers Edition' 10th-Gen Processors
- Intel Launches a Slightly Cheaper, Slightly Slower Comet Lake Core i9
- AMD Launches 64-Core Threadripper Pro for Workstation PCs
- More in Processors