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.
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.
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.
