11th Gen Intel Core H-series bring up to eight Willow Cove cores and 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes!

Intel has been teasing the 11th Gen Intel Core H-series since they announced the 11th Gen Tiger Lake H35 processors. While the Tiger Lake H35 processors were just scaled up from the Tiger Lake-U processors in terms of their power limit, the 11th Gen Intel Core H-series offer more cores, more PCIe 4.0 lanes and also options for unlocked processors.

The 11th Gen Intel Core H-series is the direct successor to the 10th Gen Intel Core H-series, which were based on the Comet Lake architecture. This generation, Intel is not only updating the core architecture to the latest Willow Cove core architecture, but they are also making them on the 10nm SuperFin node, allowing for improvements in both IPC and also efficiency. Intel claims up to 19% multithreaded performance improvements versus their 10th Gen Intel Core H-series processors.

Memory support has been bumped up to DDR4-3200 across the board too, which bring the 11th Gen Intel Core H-series processors to parity with the AMD Renoir processors and also Intel’s own 11th Gen desktop processors.

On top of that, the new processors will tout the new Intel UHD Graphics based on the Intel Xe Graphics architecture with 32EUs. The increase in core count for the 11th Gen Intel Core H-series has resulted in less die space for the integrated graphics, but since we are talking about high performance mobile processors here, you will most likely use it with a dedicated graphics solution anyway, so the lower EU count in the iGPU is definitely fine.

The iGPU can now power more displays too, with added support for dual eDP to handle secondary Companion Displays in designs like the ROG Zepyhrus Duo 15 SE or ZenBook Pro Duo. Intel apparently expects similar designs to really take off to enable new user experiences with the 11th Gen Intel Core H-series laptops.

Since we were talking about graphics, the 11th Gen Intel Core H-series will be the first laptop processors to offer 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes. While AMD was first to unveil PCIe 4.0 in their desktop CPUs, it still hasn’t made its way to laptops. The standard configuration involves 16 PCIe 4.0 lanes to the dedicated GPU, and the remaining four will be for PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage.

However we did learn that OEMs can configure the PCIe lanes to pack more PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs at the expense of the bandwidth available to the GPU, but I don’t expect to see multiple PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs in laptops given their heat output.

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Combined, the overall benefit in games of up to 21% versus the previous generation, and up to 26% versus the competition. Even the mid-range processors trade punches with the Ryzen 9 5900HS in gaming, which is great news for those looking to get the most bang for their buck.

If you need more security, there’s also the 11th Gen Intel Core vPro H-series and Xeon W-11000 mobile workstation processors. These processors support ECC memory, Intel Hardware Shield, Intel Total Memory Encryption, Intel Active Management Technology and other Intel vPro technologies that make them ideal for business PCs.

11th Gen Intel Core H-Series Processors Specs

Intel claims that there will be over eighty designs starting from as low $699, with over a million CPUs shipped by the time you read this article. Stay tuned for more coverage on the laptops featuring the 11th Gen Intel Core H-series processors!

Pokdepinion: This is probably the time to upgrade if you have been holding on to an 8th Gen Intel Core laptop until now… New architecture and new process node, and you don’t even need to splurge on an i7/i9 to get a nice, healthy performance boost!