Ice Lake was notable because it was Intel's first 10nm manufacturing process that actually made its way into real products, but we may have just gotten a glimpse at what the next refinement of the process will be capable of.
Some leaked benchmarks for an unspecified Tiger Lake-U processor with 4 cores and 8 threads were posted by user JZWSVIC on Chinese tech forum Zhihu. The leak itself doesn't post any specific information about the architecture or the name of the processor, all we can tell is that there are two versions of the chip, a 15W and a 28W, the latter of which is obviously much more powerful than the current-generation 15W offering.
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The forum post compares these benchmark scores against the 15W Intel Core i7-1065G7, and while the 28W chip is obviously much faster, what's particularly interesting is the difference between the two chips with the same TDP (thermal design power). The 15W Tiger Lake-U processor is up to 32% faster in one of the tests, which is a huge bump in performance for a single generation.
Now, it's important to note that these are leaked benchmarks and should be taken with a grain of salt. While we do know that Tiger Lake is coming, Intel hasn't shared much in the way of detailed information about its 10nm++ microarchitecture, so we don't really have much to compare these leaked benchmarks against.
Either way, as the release of Tiger Lake draws closer, we're going to start seeing a ton of leaked benchmarks for the new chips, so we're only getting started with these early leaks. One thing is for sure, though: Ultrabooks keep getting thinner, lighter and faster thanks to Project Athena, so if these leaks are to be believed, we could be seeing some amazing laptops in 2020.
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