Intel previews Tiger Lake chips and Intel Xe graphics

Most of the new Intel-powered laptops and tablets announced so far at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show are powered by 10th-gen Intel Core “Ice Lake” or “Comet Lake” chips. But Intel is providing a sneak peek at some features for the upcoming “Tiger Lake” processors that will eventually replace them.

Intel says the first Tiger Lake-powered computers should ship later this year.

At this point the company doesn’t have a lot to say about the new chips. But we do know that it’s a relatively compact processor — the image above shows a Tiger Lake-U chip on one side, and what Intel says is its smallest laptop motherboard to date on the other.

Here are a few other things about Tiger Lake that Intel has confirmed:

• They’ll be manufactured using a 10nm+ process.
• Tiger Lake processors will be Intel’s first chips with integrated Thunderbolt 4 support.
• They’ll also be the first with Intel Xe integrated graphics, which Intel says offers discrete GPU-class performance.

That last one is interesting, because it comes at a time when Intel is facing increasing competition from AMD, which says that its new Ryzen 4000 series mobile processors feature re-engineered Radeon Vega graphics with up to 59-percent better performance.

Intel has been stepping up its game on integrated graphics in recent years, with the Iris Plus graphics in the company’s Ice Lake chips offering huge gains over the usual Intel UHD graphics. But not all of the company’s current-gen processors have Iris Plus graphics — only the top tier Ice Lake chips feature Iris Plus graphics, and none of Intel’s 14nm Comet Lake chips do.

But Intel’s push into graphics doesn’t stop at integrated GPUs. The company also provided a brief teaser of its first Intel Xe discrete graphics card, which is code-named DG1, showing it running the PC game Destiny 2 (while providing no real details about performance.

You can check out the video of Intel’s news conference the Intel Newsroom website.