Intel Tiger Lake details leak – SuperFin, Willow Cove and Xe-LP

Intel Tiger Lake details leak - SuperFin, Willow Cove and Xe-LP

Intel Tiger Lake details leak – SuperFin, Willow Cove and Xe-LP

Intel’s Tiger Lake architecture is due to launch on September 2nd, delivering significant changes to the company’s core architecture, integrated graphics and 10nm lithography. With this, Intel plans to deliver a huge generational leap over today’s Ice Lake processors, ushering in a new era of mobile performance for low core count systems. 

Thanks to Videocardz, a lot of information about Intel’s next-generation processors have come to light. Intel’s Raja Koduri has seemingly confirmed some of these details through the slide below.  

Willow Cove

Intel’s newest core architecture is Willow Cove, and it offers several significant improvements over today’s Skylake and Sunny Cove (Ice Lake) designs. For starters, Willow Cove redesigns a lot of Intel’s caching structure, offering users a new mid-level cache of 1.25MB and several security-focused alterations. These security changes include Clow Flow Enforcement, which should help harden Intel’s latest processors against Spectre-style attacks.  

With Tiger Lake, Intel will be offering users significant clock speed increases over Ice Lake, which comes through core design changes and 10nm transistor changes. Willow Cove delivers higher frequencies at lower voltages, which is great news for mobile-oriented processors. 

Xe-LP graphics

Intel’s integrated graphics are due to be transformed with Tiger Lake, offering users the company’s new Xe graphics architecture, more execution units and a large L3 cache. 

Intel’s Tiger Lake Xe graphics will feature up to 96 execution units, 50% more than what Ice Lake had to offer. This should enable significant increases in iGPU performance, which will impact both gaming and productivity workloads. 

With Tiger Lake, Intel is also supporting DDR4 3200MHz, LPDDR4X 4767MHz and LPDDR5 5400MHz memory. This should leave Intel’s integrated graphics unconstrained when it comes to memory bandwidth.   

  

Intel Tiger Lake details leak - SuperFin, Willow Cove and Xe-LP  

SuperFin and SuperMIM

The most significant improvement to Tiger Lake is not its architecture; it’s in its 10nm lithography. Intel has been working to fix 10nm, and in doing so, they have created their 10nm SuperFin architecture. This change allows Intel to deliver performance benefits that are similar to a full node shift while staying on 10nm, allowing Tiger Lake to offer significantly more performance than Ice Lake, both in terms of raw performance and performance per watt. 

Another improvement that Intel has delivered is its SuperMIM capacitors, which have allowed Intel to achieve a reported 5x MIM (Metal-Insulator-Metal) capacitance. More details about these features are available through Videocardz. 

You can join the discussion on Intel’s Tiger Lake architecture on the OC3D Forums.Â