Intel’s Tiger Lake-H45 mobile processors are just days away from launch. A Spanish media outlet has leaked the specifications of the upcoming lineup, alongside the architectural details and the official performance benchmarks. As reported earlier, the TGL-H45 lineup will feature 5 new SKUs based on the 10nm Willow Cove core, with two hex-core and two octa-core parts, plus a 65W octa-core SKU for enthusiast gaming notebooks. The Core i5 CPUs have a base clock of 2.6-2.7GHz (45W) and a boost clock of 4.4-4.5GHz, with the Core i7-11800H extending it to 4.6GHz. Keep in mind that the boost clock will only be attainable on two of the fastest cores while the 4-core and all-core boosts will be notably lower:
Most of the specifications such as 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes (overall 44), 32 EU Gen 12 Xe graphics, Thunderbolt 4.0, Optane H20, and the new Intel Killer WiFi 6E network adapter were already public. However, the official gaming benchmarks are more impressive than originally expected. As you can see in the above picture, the hex-core i5-11400H can be seen competing with the octa-core Ryzen 9 5900HS (Cezanne) APU in most games. This is despite the fact that the 11400H has two fewer cores as well as a slightly lower boost clock. However, considering that this is a mobile SKU, the performance will vary from OEM to OEM, and as such take it with a grain of salt.
Either way, it seems like Intel will be competitive in the high-performance mobile CPU market once again after more than a couple of years. Over the past 4-5 years, the company had been refreshing its 14nm Skylake core over and over again, without any definite generational gains.
