Intel’s upcoming Tiger Lake CPUs are supposed to be the most advanced chips the company has designed ever since, well, ever since its 14nm troubles started which lasted for more than half a decade. Although the Willow Cove core architecture is essentially a minor update over the Sunny Cove design powering the 10th Gen processors, it still promises an IPC uplift of 15-20%:
Regardless, paired with the Gen12 graphics architecture and the 10nm++ (SuperFin) node, Tiger Lake is looking like a decent generational upgrade, especially in terms of single-core and graphics performance. As per a recent leak, even the lower-end Pentium parts in the 11th Gen lineup will boast impressive single-threaded performance:
As you can see the increased L1 and L2 cache are instrumental in pushing the Willow Cove cores past the Zen 2 and Sunny Cove cores powering Renoir and Ice lake, respectively. The dual-core Pentium is more or less on par with Renoir in terms of single-threaded performance while nearly leveling with the 4300U in terms of multi-threaded grunt.
Considering that the Pentium chips are mostly found in NUC sized devices and cheaper ultrabooks, the multi-threaded performance shouldn’t be much of a concern.
Tiger Lake powered notebooks are slated to arrive in September in the 15-30W (U and Y series) segment, with the H-series lineup for gaming and power users expected to launch in early 2021.
