Due to the global pandemic, this year’s annual Computex event in Taiwan is being held virtually, but all the big-name companies have keynotes to …
Due to the global pandemic, this year’s annual Computex event in Taiwan is being held virtually, but all the big-name companies have keynotes to present their latest news and wares. Intel is no different, and this year the hot ticket items stem from an expansion or ‘refresh’ of their Tiger Lake-U series processors (as we exclusively confirmed at AnandTech in April) but also the first fruits of an Intel 5G solution developed through the partnership with MediaTek. At the start of the year, the lay of the land for Intel in the second half of 2021 was confusing. The company was promising to deliver its 12 th Generation Core ‘Alder Lake’ portfolio to both desktop and mobile by the end of the year, and there was some confusion as to which market was going to get the hardware first. As Intel ramps up its 10nm product lines, and as silicon supply chain shortages are slowly rectifying themselves, the initial expectation was that Alder Lake was to be introduced first for mobile processors, given that these are usually smaller and easier to bring to market. With the Q1 2021 launch of Rocket Lake (11 th Gen) for desktop, it would also make sense to launch a mobile product first as that was launched back in Q3 of 2020 (Tiger Lake-U). However, as we reported on last month, Intel’s route for processor updates has another stepping stone we hadn’t heard of before. As part of its Partner Connect conference to OEM and retail partners, Intel disclosed that it was preparing a Tiger Lake-U Refresh family for the thin-and-light notebook markets. During Intel’s presentation where the TGL-U refresh was mentioned, it was specified that the refresh will only apply for 15-28 W processors. Today as part of Computex, the first elements of that Tiger Lake-U Refresh are being put in place. Normally with a refresh we typically expect a full stack of processors, but this time around Intel is only providing two, at least to begin with.
