The latest Intel 11th Generation H chips promise the most portable gaming laptops ever

After launching its first wave of 11th Generation Tiger Lake processors last year, Intel is taking a step forward at CES 2021 with its first 11th Generation H series chips, which will bring the benefits of Tiger Lake (such as the 10nm and Xe integrated graphics (revised) for even more powerful machines.

There is a catch, however: the first wave of 11th Generation H chips will be the bottom end of that support, reaching a maximum of 35W processors – instead of the more powerful 45W chips that represent the top of the range of gaming laptops from Intel. (The company is still working on these models, which it promises to have more details for in the near future.)

So while the new 35W H series chips are not the processors found in the best and most robust gaming notebooks that money can buy, they do offer quite impressive performance – meaning smaller or lighter notebooks can start to beat above its weight class, even with lower core counts and less thermal headroom.

Specifically, Intel is announcing that its new i7-11375H – the top-of-the-line model in the H35 line, with four cores, eight threads and an increased clock speed of up to 5 GHz – offers the fastest single-thread performance of any laptop, matched only by Intel’s best 45W H series chip from last year. It is impressive, especially considering that the new model has less gross energy to work here.

The new chips will also have support for Intel Killer Wi-Fi 6 or 6E, integrated support for Thunderbolt 4, DDR4 memory up to 3,200 MHz and LPDDR4 / x for up to 4,266 MHz and PCIe Gen 4.0. As for graphics, hardware companies will be able to rely on the already impressive integrated Xe-LP graphics or add additional discrete options from companies like Nvidia.

And while the lack of even more powerful 11th-generation laptop chips may be disappointing for some, Intel has started to cause what to expect next: an 8-core processor that will begin shipping “later this quarter” at speeds of up to 5 GHz, although details on that are still fine.

The first laptops equipped with the new 11th Generation H35 chips are expected to be announced at CES 2021, including models from Acer, Asus, MSI and Vaio, with Intel expecting more than 40 designs to be released in the first half of the year.