Intel makes 11th-gen Tiger Lake Chromebooks official, expects ‘breakthrough’ performance

In a post over on Medium yesterday, Intel made official what we’ve known for quite some time: 11th-gen Tiger Lake Chromebooks are coming and they will be a big upgrade to the current generation of devices on the market. That’s not to say the 10th-gen Comet Lake Chromebooks we have right now are slouches, but the raw power we’ll see in the next-gen chips from Intel will be a massive step forward for Chrome OS as a whole.

The difference this time around feels like a breath of fresh air for Chromebook users as Intel is making it clear that they are not only including Chromebooks in this new chip launch, but focusing in on them. According to Intel:

At Intel, we engineer our silicon to excel in performance across the widest variety of use cases, workloads and form factors. Chrome OS devices are no exception, and this is a key segment we focus on. Chromebooks have never been more important with the accelerated shift to working and learning from home.

10th Gen Intel Core-based Chromebooks continue to deliver leadership performance and experiences, and our internal benchmarking shows that we will extend this leadership with 11th Gen Intel Core processors with Intel Iris Xe graphics.

via Intel’s post on Medium

Intel is touting gains of 28% on web page loading, 2.7X faster graphics (thanks to the massively-improved Xe integrated GPU), a 23% increase in speed for applications like Adobe Lightroom, and up to 54% faster importing/exporting for videos in Kinemaster.

In the multitasking department, Intel is reporting that Microsoft Excel spreadsheets will open 2.5X faster while having other apps open and being on a Google Meet call while Chrome tabs launch 77% faster while watching a 4K YouTube video. These are massive gains across the board for Chromebooks and mark a huge jump in performance for a single-generation upgrade.

These speed increases will mark the arrival of thin/light Chromebooks that will be capable of far more from a graphics standpoint than what we’ve seen in the past. We know AMD is getting in the game with the official arrival of the first AMD Ryzen Chromebook launched just today, so the competition is about to become fierce in the Chromebook space. With the knowledge that services like Steam and Windows apps via Parallels are on the way for Chrome OS, it only makes sense that we’re seeing more powerful options across the board from both sides of the aisle in anticipation of Chrome OS’ growing skill set.

Intel says more info on 11th-gen Chromebooks will become available in the coming months, so I’d bet we’ll begin seeing a few trickle out by year’s end and quite a few of these new, more-powerful Chromebooks in the early parts of 2021. If you want to keep tabs on these new devices as they develop, be sure to bookmark our page of Chromebooks we’re currently tracking and keep a particular eye on the section for ‘Volteer’ Chromebooks. It’s about to get really, really fun around here with hardware.