New quad-core 1.2 Ghz Tiger Lake CPU appears on Geekbench, races past Comet Lake

A few months ago, Intel announced that their 10nm Tiger Lake CPUs will replace Ice Lake by 2020, in desktops, workstations, and on mobile. Evidence was thin on the ground as to just how much of an improvement Tiger Lake was.

Recently, tipster @TUM_APISAK spotted scores for Tiger Lake U processors on Geekbench. Earlier, we'd seen Geekbench scores for low-voltage Tiger Lake-Y parts showed up on the website. The Tiger Lake U scores, for parts in the 15-25W power envelope, are more exciting.

Per the Geekbench listing, the Tiger Lake-U chips feature 4 cores and 8 threads at with a base clock speed of 1.20 GHz. According to an earlier leak by @InstLatX64, Cache size has been increased significantly: Tiger Lake may feature 3 MB of L3 cache per core. @TUM_APISAK spotted two Tiger Lake U entries on Geekbench, one for a machine with 8GB of LPDDR4 and another for a system with 16 GB of LPDDR4.

They posted excellent scores: 1189 and 4274 single core and multicore for the 8GB configuration, and 1162 and 4274 single core and multicore for the 16GB model. These are substantially higher than the Tiger Lake-Y CPU scores we saw earlier.

Interestingly, these scores are higher than those posted by the hexa-core Comet Lake i7-10710U. We're either looking at better thermal management, better IPC, or a combination of both.

This leak lends strength to the idea that Tiger Lake might finally be a return to form for Intel. A powerful processor, paired with Gen 12 Intel Xe  graphics might give laptop users a convincing alternative to Ryzen and Skylake rehashes.