Intel’s first 35-watt gaming processors are built on 10nm Tiger Lake

Intel has announced a new line of gaming processors, which it calls Tiger Lake H35, at CES 2021. The reason for the name? They are part of its H-series of more powerful laptop chips, but only at a 35-watt power envelope.

These are Intel’s first 10nm gaming parts, which shows that the company can scale up its 10nm process for more powerful computers. Until today, the 10nm architecture has been used exclusively by U-series, 15-watt thin-and-light laptops — though technically, those chips can scale up to 28 watts.

Intel said these H35 processors will show up in more than 40 laptop designs in the first half of 2021, some of which will be announced later at CES. Intel has categorized these new laptops into its own product segment, which it calls “ultraportable” gaming laptops. To meet this standard, these new laptops need to be under 0.7 inches and should be able to do 1080p gaming at 70 frames per second or higher at High settings.

Of course, there are some laptops that use full 45-watt H-series processors that already fit this standard, such as the Razer Blade 15 and the MSI GS66 Stealth. But Intel imagines these gaming laptops going beyond that, even using 14-inch screen sizes to increase portability and create a new distinctive segment of the market.

These 35-watt chips and 14-inch gaming laptops are not without competition on the AMD side of things. Last year, the company announced the Ryzen 9 4900HS, a 35-watt processor with eight cores and 16 threads. This unique chip, however, found its way into a very limited number of laptops. The flagship device was the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, which paired its eight-core Ryzen processor with up to an Nvidia RTX 2060.

Intel didn’t comment on exactly what graphics cards these new H35 laptops would be paired with, but we may hear more details about that at Nvidia’s CES press conference, set for January 12.

It breaks down into three different models, the Core i7-11375H, Core i7-11370H, and Core i5-11300H. They’re all four-core, eight-thread chips that include Iris Xe integrated graphics.

Here’s how the stack breaks down:

Intel said the new chips should significantly outperform Intel’s 11th-gen, 15-watt Tiger Lake processors. The 35-watt chips are reportedly 9% faster in single-threaded performance and 40% faster in multithreaded performance. That’s surprising, as these H35 chips actually share a lot of resemblance to the Tiger Lake-U processors. They have the same core count, cache size, and all-core turbo speeds.

The chips can be configured down to 28 watts in some laptops, in which case the clock speeds are also decreased.

The Core i7-11375H and Core i7-11370H are nearly identical, the only difference being a slightly single-core turbo of 5.0GHz. For reference, Intel’s 14nm Comet Lake-H chips currently top out at 5.3GHz in single-core boost.

These new chips also support faster memory, now up to 3,200MHz for DDR4 and 4,266MHz for LPDDR4 (or LPDDR4X). Lastly, they also feature Thunderbolt 4, PCIe 4.0, and Wi-Fi 6E.

As for more powerful, 45-watt 11th-gen chips, Intel said that they are “coming soon.” Intel confirmed that these upcoming 45-watt chips will indeed be based on the 10nm SuperFin architecture — a first for these powerful systems. They will include Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9 configurations.

In the meantime, Intel is also expanding its 10th-gen H-series lineup. New to the stack are the Core i7-10870H and the Core i5-10500H, both still based on the older 14nm architecture and using older features such as Thunderbolt 3 and PCIe 3.0. They do, however, now have 16 lanes of PCIe directly attached to the CPU, which Intel says provides enough power for the “fastest graphics.”

Intel says over 40 laptop designs will use these new 10th-gen chips, starting later this month.