Intel finally unveils H-series Tiger Lake mobile processors for gaming and content creation notebooks
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Intel finally unveils H-series Tiger Lake mobile processors for gaming and content creation notebooks
Note: This article was first published on 11 May 2021.
It’s taken a while but Intel has finally unveiled its full stack of H-series Tiger Lake mobile processors that are targeted mainly at gamers and content creators. These processors will go head-to-head with AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series mobile processors announced earlier this year at CES 2021.
Intel announced its first 10nm Tiger Lake processors back in September 2020 and then followed up with a limited release of lower-power 35W H-series processors in January this year.
Today’s announcement sees Intel unveiling 10 new processors – five consumer-centric ones and another five commercial ones with vPro technology designed for mobile workstations.
We are going to focus on the first five since those are the ones that will be making their way into the notebooks that most of us are going to buy. Intel says these new processors will power three types of notebooks – essential, thin enthusiast, and halo enthusiast – priced from US$699 to US$1,999 and beyond. What these categories denote according to Intel are as follows:
- Essential - 1080p gaming at 60fps, medium/high settings
- Thin enthusiast - 15 to 17-inch notebooks, less than 20mm thickness, 4K gaming at 60Hz, medium/high settings
- Halo enthusiast - 1080p up to 240Hz, 4K gaming at 120Hz, high/max settings
In short, they’ll be coming to consumers in a wide range of notebooks at all price points.
Like earlier Tiger Lake processors, these processors announced today feature Intel’s new Willow Cove microarchitecture and are built on Intel’s 10nm SuperFin process.
Compared to last generation’s processors, Intel is claiming "19% gen-on-gen multithread performance improvement”. It is also claiming “the world’s fastest single-threaded mobile processor” thanks to its Intel Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0.
Also crucial is improved platform I/O bandwidth. The new processors support up to 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes. Combined with the Tiger Lake PCH-H, Intel is claiming support for up to 44 platform PCIe lanes in total, which enables support for Thunderbolt 4 and discrete Intel Killer Wi-Fi 6E.
Here's the list of consumer H-series processors that are being announced today. There are two 6-core parts and three 8-core parts. The range-topping Core i9-11980HK is the only one that's fully unlocked and supports Intel's overclocking technologies.
Here are some charts that Intel shared showing the superiority of its new processor, particularly the range-topping Core i9-11980HK, against the last generation Core i9-10980HK and AMD’s Ryzen 9 5900HX (which should be noted isn’t actually AMD’s flagship 5000 mobile CPU, that honour belongs to the Ryzen 9 5980HX).
Intel says its new H-series Tiger Lake processors have claimed over 80 design wins and will be coming to gaming notebooks later this year.
