Intel on Wednesday unveiled Tiger Lake, the 11th generation version of its flagship chip for laptops that it hopes will help it regain lost market share and counter forthcoming Apple machines with Apple-designed chips.
Intel announced the chips use a new manufacturing technique and other tweaks that make them more powerful at tasks such as using artificial intelligence to reduce background noise during video calls.
11th Gen Intel Core processors
# delivers up to 2.7x faster content creation
# more than 20% faster office productivity
# more than 2x faster gaming plus streaming
Intel said more than 150 designs based on 11th Gen Intel Core processors are expected from Acer, Asus, Dell, Dynabook, HP, Lenovo, LG, MSI, Razer, Samsung and others.
The company said it worked with laptop makers including Dell Technologies and Samsung Electronics and that 50 machines from different makers will be available for the holiday shopping season.
The Tiger Lake processors come as Intel, one of the few chip companies that both designs and makes its own chips, has struggled with manufacturing delays. The company has started to lose market share to rivals such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) that use outside manufacturers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing.
Intel executives claimed better frame-rate performance than rival chips from Nvidia and AMD.
Intel announced a co-brand for Project Athena laptops, co-engineered with manufacturers, that use Tiger Lake chips called Intel Evo. The project is aimed at boosting consumer confidence in features such as battery life.
The branding will be available to partners that make high-end machines, similar to the Ultrabook branding campaign that Intel launched in 2011 after Apple introduced its MacBook Air machines.
Apple, which announced in June it would quit using Intel chips and move to its own Apple Silicon chips, plans to release the first such machines this year.
“11th Gen Intel Core processors with Intel Iris Xe graphics are a major leap forward in real-world processor performance and are the best laptop processors we have built,” said Gregory Bryant, Intel executive vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group.
“The new 11th Gen Intel Core processors with Iris Xe graphics are delivering incredible performance and responsiveness to enable Windows customers around the world to be more productive and have fun,” said Panos Panay, chief product officer at Microsoft.
“Based on collaboration between Intel and Google, we’re able to optimize the user experience, and we are bringing the next-generation of Chromebooks to market powered by 11th Gen Intel Core,” said John Solomon, vice president of ChromeOS.
