Inside Intel’s 11th Gen H-Series CPUs

The latest range of commercial and consumer mobile CPUs enable powerful, yet thin and light laptops for gaming, content creation, and high-end professional work.

By Anil Chopra

Intel’s latest 11th generation core mobile processor architecture, Tiger Lake, has been gathering a lot of momentum ever since its first announcement at CES last year. Five processors based on this architecture were announced in September, meant for thin and light laptops. Along with the processors, Intel had also unveiled its new Evo platform brand for laptop designs based on these new processors. Then, at CES this year, the chipmaker giant introduced 50 new processors, many of which were aimed at gaming platforms for enthusiast-level gaming. Finally, in May this year, the company has introduced its Tiger Lake H processors for high-end laptops and desktops. Overall, you can expect a slew of products based on the new 11th Gen architecture in the coming weeks and months. Let’s understand what the new processors and the 11th Gen architecture from Intel are all about.

10 new CPUs

While Intel has been launching a number of Tiger Lake-based CPUs since last year, we’ll concentrate on the latest ones. Last month, the company introduced 10 new CPUs for high-end gaming, content creation, and workstation laptops. Five of these are for consumers, while the other five are for commercial devices.

All 10 CPUs are members of the 11 Gen Tiger Lake H series of laptop CPUs. In this, at the upper end of the spectrum is the Core i9–11980HK CPU, which is an 8 core, 16 thread beast with 5 GHz max boost clock speed. It’s billed as the world’s best gaming laptop processor and the only one in the series that’s fully unlocked and overclockable. This is supposed to enable you to play intensive games at 1080p resolution with 240 Hz refresh rate or play games at 4K resolution up to 120 Hz refresh rates. The capability is impressive, but the actual performance will depend upon the laptop model that OEMs build, and the games you play on it.

Besides offering far better performance, the new processor architecture enables thinner and lighter laptop designs, which was something not possible in the earlier architectures. So, you can expect OEMs to release laptops that are less than an inch thick, support 4K screens, and offer gameplay at 60 fps or more.

Core i9–11980HK CPU is billed as the world’s best gaming laptop processor and the only one in the series that’s fully unlocked and overclockable.

Other members of the series are Intel Core i5, i7, and Xeon processors. There’s no i3 variant here, as these CPUs are not meant for basic productivity work. Even the i5, for instance, which is at the lower end of the spectrum, comes with 6 cores and 12 threads, supporting a peak boost of 4.4 GHz for single-core and 4 GHz for all cores. These two SKUs are meant for budget gaming laptops.

The commercial SKUs of Tiger Lake will support Intel’s vPro technology, which offers a host of business-specific security features and management tools. Plus, it has a new AI-based threat detection technology known as Hardware Shield. Moreover, all of them are 8 core/16 thread CPUs and support ECC memory, which is not supported by the consumer variants. This makes laptops based on the commercial Tiger Lake SKUs a good option for applications like scientific or financial modeling, and it makes them more secure.

Tiger Lake’s specs at a glance

The 11th generation CPU is based on Intel’s Willow Cove Core micro-architecture. It’s manufactured on Intel’s third-gen, 10 nm SuperFin process. The new architecture replaces the Ice Lake mobile processors family. As compared to the previous architecture, Tiger Lake has up to 50% larger L3 cache and a 2.5x larger L2 cache. The GPU under this architecture has 1.5x more EUs (execution units) than the previous architecture.

The new architecture supports PCIe 4.0 as against 3.0 in the previous version and supports 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes for high bandwidth connections to discrete GPU and NVMe SSDs, while the memory support goes up to DDR4-3200. In fact, according to Intel, the new architecture enables the CPU to directly access High-Speed GDDR6 memory that’s attached to the graphics card. This feature enables gamers to have higher frame rates and smoother gameplay.

The Tiger Lake architecture also supports Thunderbolt 4, the port that supports up to two 4K displays and also doubles up as a USB4 connector. It will enable data transfers of up to 32 Gbps.

Another key specification supported by Tiger Lake is WiFi 6E, which builds upon the superfast WiFi 6 technology by adding support for a new 6 GHz band. An important feature of this band is that it will offer more WiFi channels, leading to lesser overlap between networks. This can be a boon for using the same in crowded areas like apartments or offices.

Lastly, the platform supports Dual eDP Graphics, a feature that will allow laptops to have two displays.

The commercial SKUs of Tiger Lake will support Intel’s vPro technology, which offers a host of business specific security features and management tools.

The final words

While all the specifications and features of Tiger Lake CPUs and platform sound very impressive and exciting, how much of it all you’ll enjoy purely depends upon how much and how well OEMs integrate them into their laptop models.

Gamers who’ve recently bought a gaming laptop are unlikely to go for a new Tiger Lake variant, but if you’ve purchased one a few years ago, then it would be worth exploring laptops based on the H-series model. The same logic holds for professionals due to so many enhancements being made in the platform to cater to modern-day business requirements.

All in all, it’s an exciting new architecture that has been built keeping in mind the needs of modern-day mobile users and applications. Expect most vendors now to dole out new laptop variants based on the new Tiger Lake architecture.

Chopra is VP-Research and Consulting, CMR