A few weeks ago, intel announced that it will be releasing five of its CPUs in the market for the year 2021, they are Rocket Lake, Jasper Lake, Ice Lake Xeon, Alder Lake, and the Tiger Lake-H series of processors. Among these, we have received confirmed reports from Intel that Tiger Lake-H at 45W+ will come to market in Q2, and later in 2021 Intel will also be launching a refresh of its notebook 15-28W Tiger Lake-U processors called TGL-R.
The original Tiger Lake-U family contains Intel’s 10nm SuperFin manufacturing process and it uses four of Intel’s latest Willow Cove processor cores, with the top 28 W model offering a turbo frequency up to 4.8 GHz and a base frequency of 3.0 GHz. Tiger Lake also enables 96 execution units of the new Xe-LP graphics technology, up to 1350 MHz, with support for DDR4-3200 and LPDDR4X-4266.
Tiger Lake-U was technically stated to support the LPDDR5-5400, however, it was not seen using this feature. A Tiger Lake-Refresh might have this key feature enabled with a new family of processors. Intel mentioned that the upcoming refresh only applies to the 15-28 W processors.
Intel is soon slated to announce its next-generation Alder Lake processors, using a Core + Atom hybrid design, and they will be powering both the mobile and desktop. It would seem odd for Intel to offer a Tiger Lake-U refresh if Alder Lake was close to being ready. It means that the mobile versions of Alder Lake will be kept for a Q4 release.
According to sources, when the originally the Tiger Lake-U was launched it was not possible to fully integrate the CPU with the technology. but now LPDDR5 is available to allow Intel’s OEM partners to deploy it at a reasonable cost. A fully populated LPDDR5-5600 mobile processor would enable a peak memory bandwidth of 89.6 GB/s, which is 75% above DDR4-3200 or 31% above LPDDR4X-4267.
