Intel Tiger Lake-H specifications are out -- and a new security leak

Towards the end of next quarter, Intel is expected to introduce its 10nm Tiger Lake-H laptop processors. The new series is expected to feature core counts of up to eight and should support PCI Express 4.0 across 20 lanes.

Tiger Lake-H clockspeeds leak

Thanks to a fresh Twitter leak spotted by VideoCardz, we now have some specifications of Tiger Lake-H procesors. The leaker, who previously provided information about Intel's Xe lineup, claims there are three eight-core models and two six-core parts.

The fastest new laptop chip is the Core i9-11980HK, an eight-core part with a base clock of 2.6GHz. This unlocked processor has a special 65W power mode, which increases the base clock to 3.1GHz. The 11980HK is rumored to offer a single-core Boost of 5.0GHz and an all-core Boost of 4.4GHz.

8C
11980HK: 2.6-4.5-5.0 Up to 3.3Ghz in 65W (10980HK 3.1Ghz)
11900H: 2.5-4.4-4.9 down to 2.1Ghz in 35w
11800H: 2.4-4.2-4.6 down to 2.0Ghz in 35w


6C
11400H: 2.7-4.1-4.5 down to 2.2Ghz in 35w
11260H: 2.6-4.0-4.4 down to 2.1Ghz in 35w

All frequency of TGL-H45 is AVX512 frequency. -- @OneRaichu

ASUS confirms GeForce RTX 3050 Ti has 4GB

Speaking about Tiger Lake-based laptops, ASUS inadvertently revealed the existence of a fourth NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series laptop GPU. A product listing of the ASUS TUF Dash F15 laptop reveals this model has the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti as a video card option. ASUS says the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti has 4GB GDDR6 memory. The TUF Dash F15 features Intel's 11th Gen Core Tiger Lake-H35 processors.

Yet another side channel attack, this time it's the interconnect

In other news, security researchers discovered Intel CPUs are vulnerable to yet another side channel attack. The Register writes Intel's CPU ring interconnect can be abused to leak encryption keys and other sensitive data. With existing defenses, the vulnerability is deemed to be hard to mitigate:

Doctoral student Riccardo Paccagnella, master's student Licheng Luo, and assistant professor Christopher Fletcher, all from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, delved into the way CPU ring interconnects work, and found they can be abused for side-channel attacks. The upshot is that one application can infer another application's private memory and snoop on the user's key presses.

"It is the first attack to exploit contention on the cross-core interconnect of Intel CPUs," Paccagnella told The Register. "The attack does not rely on sharing memory, cache sets, core-private resources or any specific uncore structures. As a consequence, it is hard to mitigate with existing side channel defenses."

The attack works on Intel Coffee Lake and Skylake processors. It's unknown whether more recent Intel server chips are vulnerable -- as the newest generation uses mesh interconnects.

Intel, which co-funded the study, is not overly concerned about the new attack:

"Intel classified our attack as a 'traditional side channel' (like TLBleed, Portsmash, etc.)," said [doctoral student Riccardo] Paccagnella. "They treat this class of attacks differently than the class of 'speculative execution / transient execution attacks' (like Spectre, Meltdown, etc.). That is, they do not consider traditional side channel attacks as significant value for an attacker [...]