Intel has demonstrated a laptop based on its upcoming eight-core Tiger Lake-H processor running at up to 5.0 GHz, essentially revealing some of the main selling points of its flagship CPU for notebooks. Mobile PCs based on the chip will hit the market in the second quarter, Intel said. 

As a part of its GDC 2021 showcase (via VideoCardz), Intel demonstrated a pre-production enthusiast-grade notebook running a yet-to-be-announced 11th-Generation Core i9 ‘Tiger Lake-H’ processor with eight cores and Hyper-Threading technology running at 5.0 GHz ‘across multiple cores.’  

The demo CPU is likely the Core i9-11980HK, which Lenovo has already listed, but without disclosing its specifications. This time around, Intel also did not reveal the base clocks of the processor and how many cores can run at 5.0 GHz, but it’s obvious that we’re talking about more than one core, implying 5.0 GHz is not its maximum single-core turbo clock. 

Intel’s Tiger Lake-H processors are powered by up to eight cores featuring the Willow Cove microarchitecture equipped with up to 24 MB of L3 cache and a new DDR4 memory controller. The new CPUs also have numerous improvements over processors on the platform level, including 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes to connect to the latest GPUs and high-end SSDs, as well as built-in Thunderbolt 4 support.

To demonstrate the capabilities of the 8-core/16-thread Core i9 ‘Tiger Lake-H’ CPU, Intel used the Total War real-time strategy game that uses CPUs heavily. Unfortunately, it is unknown which GPU Intel used for the demonstration or if it was a discrete high-end notebook graphics processor or Intel’s integrated Xe-LP GPU. Since the laptop featured at least a 15.6-inch display, common sense tells us that this was a discrete graphics solution.

During the presentation, Intel said that the first notebooks based on the Tiger Lake-H processor would arrive in Q2 2021 but did not disclose whether they will show up in early April or late June.