Intel Tiger Lake CPUs with Gen12 Xe Graphics Will Have Up To 96 EUs

By Nathan Kirsch

Just two months ago we were visiting with Intel to benchmark Ice Lake 10nm processors for the very first time. We were impressed with how Intel has been progressing, but now the leaks about Tiger Lake 10nm CPUs are coming on strong. Tiger Lake will be the successor to Ice Lake on laptops and it seems to be very exciting from the early rumors and leaks. Intel Tiger Lake CPUs are based on a CPU core architecture known as Willow Cove whereas Ice Lake CPUs were based on the Sunny Cove architecture.

Intel CPU Core Roadmap 2018

Both are made on the 10nm process node, but Intel has already announced that Willow Cove will bring architecture improvements such as a cache redesign, transistor optimizations, and enhanced security features. Many are expecting a ‘huge’ IPC gain from the changes.

The first leak that got our attention showed up on in a Tweet by InstLatX64. They posted up an image of an Intel Tiger Lake 4-core, 8-thread processor, with a boost clock of 3.4GHz, 12MB of L3 cache and AVX512 support. The microcode number also appears to show that Intel is late in the development game, which means this processor could be launching sooner rather than later. The L3 cache is 50% larger on Tiger Lake over Ice Lake, but a larger L3 cache usually means it has higher latency. It will be interesting to see how the dust settles there.

Compubench

The next leak that we just saw for the very first time happened over the weekend and it is from Compubench. They now have a CompuBench 2.0 Desktop result for an Intel Tiger Lake CPU. The listing appears to confirm that Tiger Lake will be using Intel Gen 12 Xe GPUs based on this entry.

“Intel Gen12 Mobile Graphics Controller” “CL_DEVICE_MAX_COMPUTE_UNITS 96”

The Intel Gen12 Xe graphics solution on this particular CPU has 96 Execution Units with a clock speed of up to 1.1 GHz. Intel Gen11 Iris Plus graphics come with up to 64 Execution Units, so this is a 50% jump in EUs! It is starting to look like the CPU and iGPU on Tiger Lake will be getting significant performance boosts from what we are starting to piece together.

compubench Tiger Lake Scores

We don’t use Compubench around here, the GFXBench results aren’t shown and these results are obviously not on final hardware/software. Not much an be inferred about the scores, but it is a good sign that we are seeing more and more Intel Tiger Lake (TGL) leaks as that means we are getting closer to launch!