Intel Tiger Lake-H now official, first benchmarks indicate Intel finally closing the multithread performance gap with AMD Ryzen 5000

With the introduction of the Tiger Lake-H35 platform at CES 2021, Intel announced that it would be segmenting its laptop offerings into ultraportable, essential, thin enthusiast, and halo enthusiast categories. While Tiger Lake-H35 caters to the ultraportable gaming segment, the other three are served by the 45 W Tiger Lake-H processors that are officially launching today.

Like the Tiger Lake U and H35 series, Tiger Lake-H is based on the 10 nm SuperFin Willow Cove architecture that promises a 19% gen-on-gen multithreaded performance improvement. With Tiger Lake-H, Intel is also bringing PCIe Gen 4 support and more fine-grained control over certain power and clock features. 

Unlike AMD's Ryzen 5000 Cezanne lineup that offers only 16 lanes of PCIe Gen 3, Tiger Lake-H is the first mobile platform to offer 20 lanes of PCIe Gen 4 connectivity directly from the CPU. OEMs can now configure x16 discrete graphics and x4 NVMe storage or use x8 lanes for discrete graphics and dual x4 lanes for NVMe RAID0.

All Tiger Lake-H CPUs come with Intel UHD Graphics with 32 execution units (EUs) based on the Xe architecture. Taking the 24 PCIe Gen 3 lanes of the PCH also into account, overall, the platform can offer up to 44 PCIe lanes. 

Tiger Lake-H also allows fine-grained clock and voltage control via the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU). It is now possible to adjust per-core voltage and modify AVX2/AVX-512 voltages for the Core i9-11980HK. Experienced users can also control the CPU's internal BCLK via MSR 0x150 aka OC Mailbox.

The Core i9-11980HK succeeds the Comet Lake-H Core i9-10980HK. The Core i9-11980HK is an 8C/16T part with a 65 W cTDP up, base clock of 2.6 GHz, up to 5 GHz 2-core boost with Turbo Boost Max 3.0, and an all-core boost clock of 4.5 GHz.

The Core i9-11980HK is made for the halo enthusiast segment and supports the fastest mobile discrete GPUs from NVIDIA, Intel Rapid Storage Technology for bootable RAID0 directly from the CPU, and is Windows Direct Storage ready. 

Intel claims up to a 21% increased gaming performance gen-on-gen with the Core i9-11980HK depending on the title. The company also showed off decent gains over the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX in tested games.

For the Ryzen 9 5900HX comparison, the RTX 3080 Laptop GPU with 16 GB VRAM was used in both the test systems. It is to be noted here that the RTX 3080 Laptop GPU had a maximum power of 155 W in the Intel system and 165 W for the AMD one.

Intel also compared the Core i5-11400H with the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS, which is locked at a 35 W TDP. However, the performance deltas in this comparison seem to be much lower than the previous one. According to Intel, these test laptops feature an RTX 3060 Laptop GPU, which has a maximum power of 65 W in the Intel system and 80 W in the AMD counterpart, which seems to be an Asus ROG Zephyrus G14.

It's not really surprising at this point, but Intel did not show off any Cinebench or specific multithreaded benchmarks during the briefing. However, the company did claim an 18% gain in video creation, 24% faster photo processing, and 19% improvements in MS Office workflows with the Core i9-11980HK over the Ryzen 9 5900HX. We will have to wait till we can get hands on review samples to properly ascertain multithreaded performance.