An Intel Tiger Lake Engineering Sample (ES) CPU has reportedly hit a clock speed of 4.0 GHz turbo on all of its cores and a single core turbo of 4.3 GHz. While still below Intel's mature 14nm mobile Comet Lake processors, which go up to 4.9 GHz, It would mark a sharp improvement over Ice Lake’s frequencies.

The information was posted this week in a tweet by KOMACHI_ENSAKA, who has previously posted information about unreleased products, A follow-up tweet clarified in another that it concerned the chip's boost frequencies.

For comparison, the fastest Ice Lake SKU, the Intel Core i7-1065G7 has a single core turbo of 3.9 GHz and an all-core boost of 3.5 GHz, so Tiger Lake hitting 4.0 GHz or more would be sizable increase. Since it concerns an engineering example, final clock speeds could be even higher.

The clock speed increase would indicate further improvements of the 10nm process, which has also struggled with meeting the performance of Intel’s exceptionally optimized 14nm process (which is hitting 5.0 GHz on all cores for desktop CPUs), aside from its yield issues. Ice Lake is built on the 10nm+ variant, while Tiger Lake is set to feature the improved 10nm++ process, making an increase in frequencies not unexpected.

Intel had previously disclosed its plans to improve 10nm performance:

(Image credit: Intel)

Intel also has a 10nm+++ on its 2029 roadmap.

Additionally, Tiger Lake will pack the improved Willow Cove architecture with possibly high single-digit IPC gains and 96 Xe execution units on the graphics side. Tiger Lake will launch in the first half of 2020, Intel chief engineering officer Murthy recently said.