Hacker News Reader

Comment by headmelted | Hacker News Reader

That was exciting. The performance gains are exciting. The product is exciting. The architecture is exciting.

This is not exciting, unless I’m entirely missing the exciting part of this, which is wholly possible.

I actually think Tiger Lake is the most exciting thing Intel has released in years. I know that's a pretty low bar, but I'm still surprised that the reaction has been this meh.

Is that because it's the first time they've said they'll be able to do a widespread production run of 10nm?

I notice they're still going for their smallest core count chips first. No desktop, no HEDT, no Xeon. Nothing more than 4 cores. That's about half of their business that's still stuck on 14nm, and what should be their highest margin SKUs.

I only really care about their consumer stuff--I'm not involved in server products or really even heavy desktop/workstation/XEON stuff.

I think it's interesting/exciting because it looks like they're starting to get higher quality results out of their 10nm node. Ice Lake was decent, but it was limited on clocks and was clear they were trying to get something viable on 10nm out the door. Almost proof of concept for all the 10nm stuff they'd been talking up and failing to deliver on for years.

But these Tiger Lake parts actually looks like higher quality 10nm running at much better frequencies. It's Intel finally delivering on their 10nm promises.

The Xe graphics are also fairly interesting. Ice Lake Gen 11 graphics was an improvement over older integrated parts, but Xe is another solid step forward. As a laptop consumer I'm always happy to get more graphical oomph so that multiple high resolutions displays can be comfortably run when I'm docked into an at-home setup (which is kinda always in this COVID world).

All in all, none of this is mind blowing, but Intel has been so... whelming... these last handful of years, that I think it's fair to be a little excited when they've finally taken a legitimate step forward.

But they didn't release pricing information, so how exciting it will be isn't exactly clear.

Ehh it's Intel. I think we can reasonably assume it'll be a little more expensive than it should be, but less expensive than it would have been in a pre-Ryzen world.

Native Thunderbolt, much faster clock speeds, and greatly improved graphics. Solid offering all around I think. Should give some competition for the Ryzen 4000-series laptop chips.

It's been a couple of decades since we saw people praising an Intel offering for being able to compete with AMD. Have to hand it to Lisa Su. Maybe having an engineer running an engineering company is actually a good idea.

Check out the YouTube video where Steve Jobs talks about what went wrong at IBM and Xerox.

I think AMD are pretty safe from Intel for a while.

That’s not to say they won’t be threatened by other parties, but it’s clear Intel still thinks it’s fabs are it’s biggest problem.

(I.e. were I Lisa Su I’d be more concerned about the new ARM chips coming over the hill from Nvidia).

> Native Thunderbolt

A nice tweak sure but also irrelevant as a consumer. It just results in one less component on the motherboard, it doesn't change any functionality.

> much faster clock speeds

Relative to what? Last year's 4c/8t 14nm i7-10510U has a higher boost frequency than any of the chips announced today, and it's also a 15 W TDP CPU. The 4c/8t i7-1185G7's 3ghz base frequency is nice I guess but barely higher than last year's 4c/8t i7-8569U at 2.8ghz base - and both are 28W TDP. Probably, anyway - the 11th gen is listed in the '12-28 W' category but as it's the highest base freq of the listed quad cores I assume it sets the top end of that range.

If there's a power improvement here, which is possible, it's not clear in the spec sheet, and I think nobody is buying Intel's marketing claims at this point. So we won't have reasons to be excited here until reviews hit, if a reason to be excited for this exists at all.

> greatly improved graphics

This is an great upgrade, but only for Intel. It's playing catch up to the Ryzen 4000-series, which means it's not exciting on its own for consumers. Exciting in that competition drives price wars & overall stronger ecosystem, but on its own? Super boring.

Thunderbolt being a built-in freebie rather than requiring a fairly large and expensive separate controller means it might start showing up in mid-range PCs rather than being a niche professional/high-end feature, which in turn increases the market size for Thunderbolt peripherals.

Its probably only the PHY for it and require additional (expensive) components to implement, just like with the "integrated" 2.5 Ghz.

Integrated Thunderbolt would reduce power consumption.

Ice Lake was released with higher IPC and lower clock (due to 10nm issue) but performs well compared to older higher clocked CPUs thanks to IPC. Now Tiger Lake is released in higher clock, why not exciting?

For iGPU, both AMD and Intel is mainly limited performance by memory bandwidth, I'm curious whether Intel releases a SKU with eDRAM.

I don't think this launch competes with even 3000-series or 4800 laptop series AMD chips [1].

[1]: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Every-AMD-Ryzen-7-4800H-laptop...

improving Intel graphics is not much of a feat

Reply on news.ycombinator.com