Intel’s 11th Gen Tiger Lake lineup is shaping up to be the first major architectural upgrade the company has worked on in a long time. We already know that the chips will feature the third iteration of the 10nm node, along with a brand new Willow Cove core and the Gen12 Xe integrated graphics. Turns out that that’s not it though.
10nm SuperFIN Node and MIM Capacitors
The 10nm+++ node that will power Tiger Lake will move from the FinFET transistor technology to something Intel calls SuperFIN transistors as well as a new kind of capacitors called Super MIM. As per sources, the SuperFIN technology may provide an efficiency boost comparable to a complete node transition.
The SuperFIN design features a higher gate pitch (increased drive current), improved gate process (higher channel mobility), and enhanced expiation source/drain (lower resistance). Lastly, the new capacitors will increase the MIM (metal-insulator-metal) capacitance by a factor of 5x, further improving the overall node efficiency. (asr.adventistas.org)
LPDDR5-5400 Memory and GNA 2.0
Tiger Lake will also be the first consumer processor to feature the LPDDR5-5400 memory standard, significantly increasing the memory bandwidth to as much as 86GB/s. This should further improve the graphics performance of the Gen12 Xe iGPU which is going to feature 50% more compute units than the preceding Gen11 part featured on Ice Lake.
The Gen12 display engine is also a big step up from Intel’s existing Gen11 and Gen9.5 solutions. It supports 4K30 with plans for up to 4K90 and images up to 42 Megapixels (initially 27 MP). Tiger Lake will also leverage neural networks such as the Gaussian and Neural Accelerator 2.0 for high dynamic range noise cancellation.
In another first, Tiger Lake will be the first chip to include support for Thunderbolt 4 and USB4, featuring bandwidths up to 40Gb/s. It’ll also be Intel’s first processor to support the PCIe 4.0 standard which was first introduced with AMD’s Zen 2 chips more than a year back.
