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We have been impressed by the potential shown by Intel Tiger Lake and are looking forward to retail examples of laptops with this new Intel chip, however we have a significant proviso to attach to that statement.
You can clearly see in our charts how Tiger Lake improves its performance when you switch from Balanced Mode to High Performance Mode which entails a change of PL1 from a juicy 28W to an enormous 41.5W. Enormous, that is, in the context of thin and light laptops. You will have seen the CPU running above 90 degrees Celsius and you have to wonder how that performance will impact on battery life. You may even wonder whether High Performance Mode is more like a party trick than your preferred daily driver.
Switching to Silent Mode and 20W takes us down near the territory where we typically find thin and lights but now the CPU is running around 2.75GHz which is fairly languid. The fourth option is Super Battery Mode and 15W which slows the CPU to 2.3GHz. The thing is, 15W is what you expect to see from a super-thin laptop and 2.3GHz doesn't seem especially fast.
It might also be worth noting that 15W is the rating for the CPUs in Apple iPad Pro which also operates around 2.3GHz but we very much doubt that Tiger Lake will be able to win that particular battle.
The other part of the silicon equation is the introduction of Intel Iris Xe graphics with significantly more EU's than the previous generation, and also some extra features to do with video encoding. Have you seen the next Tiger Canyon NUC (based on Tiger Lake) will support dual HDMI outputs, including one HDMI 2.1? that sounds absolutely epic. We were pretty much blown away with the gaming performance of Tiger Lake, and it made no difference whether we were running on mains power or battery.
The big question is going to be how many laptop manufacturers decide to deliver a pure Intel experience without an add-in chip such as Nvidia MX450. Based on past experience we would have thought add-in chips will be the usual approach but we have to hope that some manufacturers decide to cut costs, reduce prices and deliver Intel laptops at £999 or less that can directly compete with the likes of Lenovo IdeaPad Slim.
KitGuru says: Our preview shows that 11th Gen. Tiger Lake has impressive levels of potential. Bring on the new laptops!
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