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Next-gen Intel Tiger Lake processors for Chromebook and netbooks have arrived, reports say, and could outperform almost everything in the category. More succinctly, that’s the company’s 11th generation platform. Now, Intel has apparently indicated that these chips are built on the 10nm node. But that doesn’t seem to be impacting the performance gains at all. That’s because the company says it utilized a proprietary SuperFin process for higher frequencies and more efficiency.
Of course, Intel is also stacking in a plethora of new features to match the leap forward.
That includes at least a few new AI-assisted features from enhanced background audio suppression and background blur for video conferencing to Thunderbolt 4 and Wi-Fi 6. Intel also placed a focus on Dolby Vision and AV1 codec for 4K support at the hardware level.
Intel Tiger Lake clocks and graphics are the bigger story for Chromebook
The new chips should drastically improve performance across the board. But that will be seen nowhere more prominently than in no fewer than five of Intel’s nine initial chip designs. That’s because the new Tiger Lake-based Intel Core i5 and i7 offerings will be coupled with new integrated graphics that approach gaming laptop graphics cards, but for Chromebook and netbook users.
Dubbed the Iris Xe integrated graphics platform, those pack 96 EUs and 12MB of L3 cache on the Core i7 versions, while the i5 packs 8MB of L3 cache. Initial benchmarks point to around 2.5 TFLOPS of compute power, comparable to the GeForce GTX 1550 Ti or the Radeon RX 5300M, reports say.
The Intel Core i7-1185G7 is a four-core eight-thread design with a 3.0GHz base clock. That’s with a 4.3GHz multi-core and 4.8GHz single core clock. The Iris Xe goes up to 1.35GHz for the top-level Tiger Lake chip. But even the Intel Core i3-1120G4, at the budget end for this series with just two cores, clocks up to 3.5GHz on the single-core side. And up to 1.1GHz on the graphics side.
So what does any of this mean for end users?
Now, all of these figures won’t necessarily mean a whole lot for day to day netbook users. What they do mean for every Chromebook user is that the devices, or at least those packed with 11th-Gen Intel Tiger Lake chips, are going to very clearly be a cut above the rest on performance.
