After a long wait, Intel’s 10nm process is finally displacing 14nm across the Core laptop lineup, relegating the older process to desktop products. Tiger Lake-H replaces Comet Lake-H for gamers, enthusiasts, and content creators, whereas additional Tiger Lake-UP3 versions update the thin-and-light segment. The new processors optionally connect to Intel’s Wi-Fi 6E chips as well as a 5G modem that MediaTek designed. PCI Express Gen4 provides faster connections to discrete GPUs and SSDs. The processors’ Willow Cove CPU delivers a per-clock-performance (IPC) boost over Skylake, offsetting slightly lower maximum clock speeds in the H-series.

The greatest price/performance increases come in the i7 and i5 tiers of the Core H-series; the 11400H gains two cores compared with its predecessor, as does the 11800H at the $395 price level. Even though all Tiger Lake-H versions have a nominal 45W TDP, the top-end 11980HK is configurable to 65W (TDP-up), whereas all other versions are configurable to 35W (TDP-down). They all include new graphics using the Xe-LP architecture. Base clock speeds (at 45W) are flat to up, even for the i5 chips with two additional cores.

Refreshing Tiger Lake-UP3, Intel introduced the Core i7-1195G7, which boosts maximum clock speed to the same 5.0GHz as the i9-11980HK, a first for the U-series. It also bumped up i5 turbo speeds in the new 1155G7. As with other Tiger Lake-UP3 versions, the i5-1155G7 and i7-1195G7 are configurable for a 12W or 28W TDP. They likewise have four cores, up to 12MB of L3 cache, and Xe-LP graphics.