Intel Corp. today revealed a family of 10-nanometer central processing units, the Tiger Lake-H series, for high-end laptops optimized to run video games and business applications.

There are a total of 10 Tiger Lake-H processors organized into two sets of five. The first five are for consumer laptops, with Intel’s main target audience being video game enthusiasts, while the others target enterprise-grade laptops. 

The enterprise processors have new technology for detecting a difficult-to-spot type of malware that assembles parts of itself from legitimate programs running on workers’ devices. The consumer CPUs, in turn, offer overclocking features that allow users to go beyond the default maximum speed if their laptops’ cooling system allows.

On the hardware side, Intel advertises the Tiger Lake-H series as providing up to 19% higher performance per clock cycle than earlier silicon. The performance boost is paired with a threefold increase in PCIe bandwidth, meaning Tiger Lake-H processors can transfer data to and from a laptop’s storage drive and graphics card that much faster. The result, Intel says, is an up to 29% speedup for some product development applications and an up to 12% boost when running programs commonly used in the financial sector.

The most powerful processor in the consumer-focused half of the Tiger Lake-H lineup is the Core W-11955M. Its enterprise counterpart is the i9-11980HK, which has practically identical specifications. Both CPUs have eight cores that run at a base frequency of 2.6 gigahertz and can accelerate to 5GHz for brief time intervals. They have an integrated Xe graphics processing unit operating at 1450MHz.

The consumer-focused Core W-11955M has a top thermal design power of 65 watts. However, an overclocking option allows consumers to boost the chip’s power supply past that point to achieve a performance lift.

The enterprise-grade Tiger Lake-H chips pack a few unique features of their own. The main highlight is a pair of cybersecurity technologies meant to help companies protect employee laptops from cyberattacks.

The first is called CET, short for Control-flow Enforcement Technology. It’s designed to block malware strands that carry out cyberattacks by exploiting so-called memory safety issues, or flaws in how the applications installed on a user’s laptop access the onboard memory. One of the most common tactics used by such malware is known as return-oriented programming. Using this technique, a malicious program stitches together the code with which it carries out attacks from code snippets that other, legitimate programs run in the computer’s memory.

One reason this hacking method has caught Intel’s attention is that it can be particularly difficult to detect. The CET technology in the enterprise-grade Tiger Lake-H chips detects attacks by creating a log, or shadow stack, of applications’ normal memory usage. When it detects memory usage that is unusual, such as a program trying to assemble code from parts of other applications, the mechanism can raise the alarm. 

Intel has also equipped the chips with what it describes as an industry-first “silicon-enabled artificial intelligence threat detection” technology. It’s designed to spot ransomware and cryptomining attacks targeting Windows machines, according to the chipmaker. 

Intel claims to have so far shipped more than 1 million of the new Tiger Lake-H chips to laptop makers, which plan to use the series as the basis of more than 80 upcoming laptops. Most of the machines target the consumer market, while a little over a dozen cater to the enterprise.

Image: Intel