Intel’s 11th-gen Tiger Lake-H chips promise 19% faster laptop performance

Another year, another set of chips by Intel. The company today announced its 11th-gen H-series chips — codenamed Tiger Lake-H — which the company claims offer up to a 19% speed boost over the prior comet lake technology. The H-series chips are normally found in larger gaming and desktop-replacement laptops, so it’s a welcome improvement.

The jump in performance isn’t exactly a huge surprise; Intel is moving from a 14nm architecture to a 10nm one, so the improvements are to be expected. Still, it’s a relief, as Intel’s H-series chips had been stuck at 14nm since way back with 2015’s Skylake chips. (Intel had already moved onto a 10nm process for ultraportable chipsets).

The top chip is the new Core i9-11980HK with 8 CPU cores and a 5GHz turbo boost speed — Intel says it offers the fastest single-threaded performance of any laptop processor to date. That said, it’s also the only 65W processor of the new lineup, with the rest of them sporting a 35W configuration.

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The company is clearly taking aim at AMD too, with a nicely curated chart claiming its top-of-the-line chip outperforms the Ryzen 5900HX by 17-26% in certain games.

The company also claimed improved productivity performance, such as 18% better “video creation workflow” in Adobe After Effects.

I’m not sure these are exactly fair comparisons though, given the 5900HX has a 45W TDP compared to the i9’s 65W. Things appear to be a good deal more balanced when comparing the companies’ other 35W chips, but the jury is still out until we can see some independent testing.

The company also talked little about battery life, although admittedly that isn’t always a major consideration with the type of laptops these chips would be going in. Raw performance aside, the chips feature PCIe 4.0 support, Intels new Xe integrated graphics, and Thunderbolt 4 support.

As usual, a bunch of companies announced new laptops to coincide with the launch. There’s new stuff from Dell/Alienware, HP, Razer, MSI, Asus, and more.