Intel announces 11th Gen mobile H-series processors, Alder Lake and more

Intel’s CES 2021 conference was rather busy as the company unveiled and teased a slew of new platforms and products. Sadly we didn’t get all the details, but the rough preview we were given looks exciting.

Let’s start with arguably the more interesting one – Alder Lake. The platform is set to go against Apple’s ARM M1 chip. Intel says it uses a hybrid architecture similar to ARM’s BIG.little by utilizing high-performance cores along with high-efficiency ones. However, Intel wants this platform to be the foundation of future desktop and notebook processors instead of focusing on mobile platforms.

These chips will likely hit the market in the second half of this year and will use an improved version of the 10nm SuperFin manufacturing process and unlike the other platforms announced today, the Alder Lake will be part of the 12th Generation Intel processors.

In the current 11th Gen CPUs, Intel teased its Tiger Lake 35W and 45W processors for laptops. They are essentially the 15W and 35W Tiger Lake variants but boosted to 35W and 45W, respectively, enabling them to reach 5.0 GHz clock speeds. They will deliver up to 8 cores and features such as Thunderbolt 4, Wi-Fi 6/6E and PCIe Gen 4 to support high-performance dedicated GPUs.

For the desktop PC enthusiasts, Intel teased its Rocket Lake Core i9-11900K CPU supporting PCIe 4.0 and bumping up the IPC (instructions per cycle) by 19% in an attempt to ultimately snatch back the gaming crown from AMD.

The 10nm SuperFin process will be powering up low-end and devices for education in the form of Jasper Lake. The Pentium Silver and Celeron processor lineups based on the new architecture promise a 35% performance boost in most applications and 78% better graphics performance.

And finally, Intel introduced Tiger Lake for the business consumers splitting its products into two lineups – vPro and Evo vPro. The latter is basically vPro plus Intel’s current Evo platform. Both offer enhanced security and business features as they usually do.

All of the new products are expected to come around this quarter except for Alder Lake – they will arrive sometime in the second half of this year.