Intel 11th gen Tiger Lake processors are here for gaming laptops, and Nvidia have also announced
RTX 3050 and 3050 Ti graphics for laptops as well, so let’s start out with the Intel
news, then Nvidia news after.
Now Intel’s 11th gen Tiger Lake processors for laptops have been here for a few months
now, however these were for lower powered variants that only went up to 4 cores.
This launch is what’s known as H45, so 6 and 8 core parts with higher power limits
too, so the stuff you’d find in gaming laptops.
Basically the 11th gen chips that will replace the 10th gen parts like i7-10750H or i9-10980HK
for example.
Intel are claiming that these new 10nm 11th gen Tigerlake parts offer 19% gen-on-gen IPC
gains to multi threaded performance when compared to 10th gen, and 12% IPC gains to single threaded
performance.
Along with Thunderbolt 4, these new chips are also offering 20 lanes of PCIe Gen 4.0.
This means that the OEM could choose to dedicate either 8 or 16 PCIe 4 lanes to discrete graphics,
while AMD Ryzen 5000 on the other hand seems to be limited to 8 lanes of PCIe 3 for the
GPU.
Likewise, Intel 11th gen systems can take advantage of faster PCIe gen 4 storage, while
again Ryzen 5000 is limited to PCIe 3 there.
These are the new processors that will be available in laptops from May 17th.
This generation 6 cores is the minimum, which is good to see, and those make up the i5 lineup
with the wonderfully named i5-11260H and the i5-11400H processors - finally no more quad
cores, unless they plan on introducing these later or something.
Stepping up from that there’s just one i7 part at the moment, the 11800H which has 8
cores 16 threads.
This has 50% more L3 cache compared to the 16 megabytes found in the 10th gen i7-10875H
from last generation, another welcome change, and it’s also worth noting AMD’s Ryzen
7 5800H also has 16 megabytes of L3 cache, so now Intel has the lead here.
The clock speeds differ though, the i7-11800H has a single core turbo speed of 4.6GHz, while
the last gen i7-10875H was 500MHz higher with a 5.1GHz single core boost.
Intel says that they’ve been able to make up the ground with IPC gains, despite 11th
gen appearing to clock lower than 10th gen.
This is also seen at the top of the stack with the i9s, the 11980HK has a 5.0GHz single
core turbo while last generation the 10980HK could boost up to 5.3GHz.
But despite this Intel says the other improvements give a nice boost to 11th gen - it’s not
all about clock speed.
The memory speed of this generation has also been boosted to DDR4-3200, so the same as
AMD’s Ryzen 5000, no need for overclocking to hit it which I think was only possible
with 10th gen 8 core processors.
Just briefly, these are the new mobile processors that we’ll see in workstation style laptops,
and these offer the usual extras like ECC memory support and various enterprise security
features.
Now let’s checkout some benchmarks, but keep in mind that these were all done by Intel,
so take the results with a grain of result until we can get these parts in for testing.
You’ll definitely want to make sure you’re subscribed for when these 11th gen machines
start coming in for review!
Here’s how the top end i9 chips compare between 10th and 11th generations, and it’s
worth noting that Intel have specified the GPU power limits at the bottom of the slides
which is a welcome addition - both of which in this case had 155 watt RTX 3080s.
Now here’s how these same selection of games differ between AMD’s Ryzen 9 5900HX and
the Intel i9-11980HK.
Again I need to run my own suite of games on both to compare, but Intel are saying they’re
ahead in these titles.
Intel also compared the ASUS Zephyrus G14 with Ryzen 9 5900HS against an Intel test
system with apparently lower GPU power limit, showing the i5-11400H with fewer cores putting
up a fight.
Honestly I don’t find it too surprising to see Intel claiming a win over AMD’s Ryzen
5000 in gaming, given I’ve already shown that Intel 10th gen can still beat AMD today.
Intel provided a few content creation style comparisons, but there wasn’t much.
Nothing like Cinebench or anything like that, so I’m curious if that means that AMD still
has an edge in those multicore rendering style workloads and they didn’t want to show it.
The i9-11980HK processor is also fully unlocked like previous generations, so you get full
voltage control and you can modify things like clock speed.
Now this is in contrast to AMD’s Ryzen 9 5900HX, they said that’s supposed to be
unlocked by that doesn’t quite appear to be the case, at least for now.
Every laptop that I’ve had with that processor best case just lets you modify the power limit
of the CPU.
Things like clock speed and voltage control aren’t available either through software
or the BIOS.
I’m not sure if that’ll change, but from what I’ve heard so far it sounds like the
power limit control is all we’re going to get, so for those CPU overclocking enthusiasts
the Intel HK processor might be the way to go.
As for available, Intel says that 1 million systems have already shipped to OEMs for launch,
so hopefully there’s some decent stock out there, as that was an issue for AMD’s Ryzen
5000 at launch, and to some degree is still an issue today.
That said it’s honestly hard to say whether or not 1 million units is a lot, I’ve got
no clue and those things are going to be spread out all over the world.
If Intel’s IPC gains turn out to be true, combined with the additional cache on the
8 core processors, along with the boost to DDR4-3200 memory as a default, and of course
the faster PCIe Gen 4, well let’s just say AMD might have a challenge on their hands.
Alright now let’s move over into the Nvidia news.
We’re getting two new GPUs for laptops, the RTX 3050 and RTX 3050 Ti, and this is
how they compare against the rest of the 30 series lineup.
The key difference between the Ti and non Ti is in the core counts and clock speeds.
Both have 4 gigs of VRAM like the GTX 1650, but at least it’s GDDR6 memory here.
Additionally the power limit range is between 35 and 80 watts, higher than the 35 to 50
watts of the GTX 1650.
There isn’t currently any news on whether or not the GTX lineup will continue, so it
may be the case that the 3050 replaces the 1650 this generation with a focus on ray tracing
only GPUs for laptops, we’ll have to wait and see.
How well the 3050 does in actual ray tracing is yet to be seen, but I can’t imagine it
going too well at the lower side of that power limit range.
In any case, outside of ray tracing this will still be beneficial by bringing features like
DLSS to more people in the mid range, as unlike ray tracing this at least aims to boost performance,
and many games are actually offering this feature now.
We didn’t get too much information from Nvidia in terms of performance, in this example
there are just a couple of games that actually have data points for the GTX 1650 Ti, outlining
how the new GPUs compare.
It’s at zero for the other three games because it doesn’t support ray tracing.
Otherwise esports titles are at least looking good based on Nvidia’s numbers provided,
but I’ll have these new laptops soon enough to test with for myself so stay tuned.
Nvidia says that pricing will start from $799 USD, so I’d assume that to be a lower end
RTX 3050 model, so probably lower storage, memory or a lower tier screen in order to
hit the lower price point.
That’s just my guess though, I’m definitely happy to be wrong and hope we see great options
for that amount.
Nvidia also mentioned these new laptops coming to market.
The MSI GS76, a 17” version of the GS66 is arriving here soon for review, and I’ll
have a video covering the new Zephyrus M16 up tomorrow.
Considering how well RTX 2060 laptops did in ray tracing, especially the lower powered
Max-Q variants, it’s hard to say how well the 3050 is going to do.
In my opinion the 2060 just wasn’t great for ray tracing, so it’ll be interesting
if the 3050 does beat it, and it will be especially interesting if it’s actually useful in ray
tracing.
Again make sure you’re subscribed for my upcoming comparisons.
I’ve got laptops with RTX 3050, 3050 Ti and 3060 graphics in the same chassis for
a fair comparable result coming from XMG soon - you definitely won’t want to miss that
one!