Intel Tiger Lake spotted crushing Ice Lake at 4.8GHz boost, 1.55GHz GPU clock

(Image credit: Intel)

Nvidia isn't the only company with a significant launch next week. Intel is also ramping up towards the launch of its Tiger Lake (11th Gen) mobile chips, imbued with the Intel Xe graphics architecture, and preliminary benchmarking data would have them arriving significantly faster than their Ice Lake counterparts—like a lot faster.

Benchmarking results from Geekbench 5 show the Intel Core i7 1185G7, assumedly Tiger Lake's top chip and the new-age equivalent of the Core i7 1065G7, operating with a 2.99GHz (3GHz effective) base clock and 4.79GHz (4.8GHz effective), a significant increase over its Ice Lake equivalent.

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Intel Tiger Lake vs. Ice Lake
Header Cell - Column 0	Core i7 1185G7 (Tiger Lake)	Core i7 1065G7 (Ice Lake)
Row 0 - Cell 0	Unconfirmed	Row 0 - Cell 2
Cores/threads	4/8	4/8
Base clock (GHz)	3	1.3
Boost clock (GHz)	4.8	3.9
Max EUs	96 EU	64 EU
Max GPU clock (GHz)	1.55	1.1

Not only is the CPU within the Tiger Lake mobile chip faster than past generations by some margin, so is the integrated GPU. Our first glimpse of the Intel Xe architecture, albeit in mobile chip form, the 96 EU GPU within Tiger Lake is reportedly clocked to 1.55GHz, a respectively colossal increase over the 64 EU GPU within Ice Lake at 1.1GHz 'Max Dynamic Frequency'.

There is a single Ice Lake chip that makes up some of this deficit: the 28W Core i7 1068NG7, at 2.3GHz base and 4.1GHz boost—however, this is exclusively found within Apple Macbook's and the GPU max clock remains at 1.1GHz.

11th Gen Intel Core i7-1185G7Base Frequency 2.99 GHzMaximum Frequency4.79 GHzIntel(R) Gen12 Desktop Graphics ControllerMaximum Frequency1.55 GHzhttps://t.co/NNQbVWoAw0https://t.co/l24aisom4QAugust 27, 2020

Intel Tiger Lake processors utilise the 10nm SuperFin process node. This is a intranode step that would usually be denoted by a + (10nm, 10nm+, 10nm++, etc.), however, Intel has wisely decided against the continuation of that tradition for 10nm++ and instead settled for something a little more descriptive: SuperFin.

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And it appears as though this process optimisation, building on the FinFET transistor, is working wonders for Tiger Lake chips.

While the Core i7 1185G7 clock speeds remain unconfirmed, this conforms with Intel's promise of "a dramatic frequency increase" with its next-gen laptop processors. Also considering we're not far from the release of Intel's next-generation mobile processors, it's likely we are therefore looking at something close to the final shipping product.

And that's an incredibly exciting prospect. Intel Ice Lake thin-and-light laptops, such as the Dell XPS 2-in-1, are superb devices capable of a surprising level of gaming performance for such slight devices. Building on that foundation with faster, better equipped GPUs, alongside speedy four-core CPUs, Intel Tiger Lake is surely something to look forward to.

Intel is holding one we expect to be a Tiger Lake (Gen 11) launch event on September 2, 2020.

Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog, before graduating into breaking things professionally at PCGamesN. Now he's managing editor of the hardware team at PC Gamer, and you'll usually find him testing the latest components or building a gaming PC.