Intel Teases Tiger Lake Launch Event on September 2 (Update: Confirmed)

Update 8/5/2020 1:15pm PT: Intel has confirmed via its Investor Relations website that the live streamed virtual event on September 2 will in fact be the launch of the Tiger Lake processors. The company also added Raja Koduri's Hot Chips presentation to its calendar for August 13, 2020.

Original Article:

Intel has notified the press via email that it will hold a virtual event on September 2 because "we have something big to share." Given the timing of the virtual event, we expect it to cover the company's 11th-Gen Tiger Lake CPUs along with the long-anticipated Xe Graphics DG1, a discrete mobile GPU that will mark the debut of Intel's new graphics processors. 

Intel teased both products at its keynote during CES 2020, and the timeline fits within our general expectations for a launch in Q3. It would also help for Intel to have something new to parry AMD's 7nm Renoir chips that have proven to be potent contenders in the mobile space, but Intel's pending chips don't appear to be a paper tiger. 

From what we already know, the 10nm+ Tiger Lake-U chips will feature a 50% increase in L3 cache capacity, going from 8MB to 12MB, for a total of 3MB per core. The chips also support AVX-512 and are expected to come with Intel's Willow Cove cores and Intel's Gen12 Xe graphics. The new chips also support faster DL boost and inference engines, including hardware acceleration for INT8, to tackle AI workloads. 

If Intel does tease the pending Tiger Lake chips, we can expect more details like launch dates and a few details about the new laptops that will arrive later in the year. Intel also has multiple other projects in flight, so we could hear more about its Rocket Lake chips for the desktop or other upcoming processors, but those details would probably be slight for now – just enough to keep us guessing, much like the invite you see above.