Intel Tiger Lake-H with up to eight cores coming soon; rumored to sport Xe LP with 32 EUs, but threat from AMD Cezanne looms on the horizon

Intel recently announced the Willow Cove-based Tiger Lake lineup for thin and light laptops, and it was only natural to speculate that the architecture would eventually expand beyond four cores. Looks like we will get to see 8-core Willow Cove processors soon, according to a blog post by Boyd Phelps, Intel's CVP of Client Computing Group, on Medium.

Boyd's post mainly deals with the advantages that the new Tiger Lake platform offers in terms of architecture, graphics, power efficiency, memory, and the likes. In the midst of it all, he confirms that an 8-core product is in the works. He writes,

The Willow Cove core increases the mid-level cache to 1.25MB — up from 512KB. We also added a 3MB non-inclusive last-level-cache (LLC) per core slice. A single core workload has access to 12MB of LLC in the 4-core die or up to 24MB in the 8-core die configuration (more detail on 8-core products at a later date)".

A H-series processor means a TDP between 35 W to 45 W and information to that effect has been discovered by known leaker Sharkbay on the PTT Shopping forums. According to Sharkbay, the following Tiger Lake core and iGPU configurations can be expected:

Tiger Lake-H will apparently be available in both 35 W and 45 W variants with the former topping out at four cores and the latter up to eight cores. It is interesting to see Tiger Lake-H offering only 32 EUs of Iris Xe LP integrated graphics. This could be because most of the H-series notebooks usually come with some sort of discrete graphics options. By the time Tiger Lake-H is official, we may get to see NVIDIA Ampere and AMD RDNA2 mobile variants that would complement this CPU. Another possibility is that Intel could be offering its own 96 EU Xe as a dGPU variant, the DG1.

From early benchmarks, it was evident that Intel has finally managed to keep pace with AMD's Renoir Ryzen 4000 at least in a few tests. The introduction of 8-core parts for gaming and content creation laptops will see Intel fighting it out with the likes of the AMD Ryzen 7 4800H and the Ryzen 9 4900H. Of course, AMD will not be resting on their laurels and we can expect Zen 3 Cezanne to counter both Tiger Lake-U and H-series quite handsomely.