Intel is promising "dramatic frequency increases" in its next-generation laptop processors, suggesting that Tiger Lake could be a real thorn in the side of AMD's mobile Ryzen chips. Intel's latest architecture day seems to be aimed solely at clearing away any hints of the demise of its technological prowess.

And amidst the technical deluge about Intel's ray-traced gaming GPUs and dangerous Alder Lake hybrid CPUs, a few specific details about the soon-to-be-released Tiger Lake laptops were revealed. These 11th generation mobile chips use the new 10nm manufacturing process, and before anyone could start screaming about 10nm+, Intel came up with a new brand name: 10nm SuperFin.

The Willow Cove cores that make up the Tiger Lake CPUs will be the first products to bring the new 10nm SuperFin process to market. Damn, it sounds like a Russian doll with an Intel CPU code name.

The SuperFin details seem to be specifically marketed against the idea that Intel is losing process leadership to TSMC's 7nm node (and by extension AMD). [According to the released slides, the new design offers 15-20% higher performance than the current generation of Ice Lake chips. [The process improvements mean that the Willow Cove cores can offer both higher voltage and higher frequency at the same time, which means that clock speeds that are likely to reach 5GHz are within reach. Perhaps only for a very short time, though. [AMD's eight-core Ryzen Mobile processor is still a quad-core chip. However, Intel has suggested that we may be surprised at how four Tiger Lake cores perform against eight Ryzen.

This is not the only new silicon offered in Tiger Lake, the bulk of the die space is taken up by the new Intel Xe LP graphics technology: with 96 execution units, this integrated GPU is the largest GPU Intel has ever put in a CPU, and is actually a decent GPU on its own. and is actually expected to deliver decent gaming performance on its own.

There is also speculation that the Intel Xe DG1 discrete GPU, also shipping this year, will be included in Tiger Lake laptops and may work with the integrated Xe GPU in the CPU itself.

However, this is still pure speculation, and multi-GPU integration is definitely too formidable for Intel to crack this time around.

There is talk about the scalability of the Xe GPU architecture and the use of multiple Xe tiles in HP's design, but that is much easier to manage with a graphics chip in the data center than one trying to spit out a Horizon Zero Dawn frame It is.

Intel Tiger Lake laptops are due out in September, and I'm looking forward to the possibility of serious thin and light gaming performance from something as slender as the Dell XPS 13. Hmmm.