Intel will not sidestep Apple's move to produce its own chips. The chipmaker's next-generation laptop processors are likely to offer significantly enhanced graphics to compete with Apple silicon.

The Tiger Lake Core chips, which Intel expects to have ready around October, will feature new Gen12 Xe graphics and offer a new integrated GPU running at up to 1.3 GHz, according to benchmark leaks. This means it will offer a significant performance boost over the current generation of Ice Lake chips and their Iris Plus GPUs.

The benchmark leak comes from chip leak regular APISAK on Twitter, who posted a list from the SiSoftware site revealing the specs of the new Xe graphics The GPU has 768 cores, 96 execution units, and, as mentioned, runs at 1.3 GHz. As noted, it runs at 1.3 GHz.

Comparatively, the current top GPU in the Gen11 Iris Plus series has 512 GPU cores and 64 execution units and runs at 1.1 GHz. This means that the new Xe graphics accelerators will have improved specifications over previous products. Intel had previously said that the Xe GPU would offer twice the performance of Iris Plus graphics.

Previous benchmark leaks of the 11th generation Tiger Lake Intel Core i7-1185G7 have shown how it can beat the AMD Ryzen 4800U, a chip that has been delivering impressive performance in laptops. So we expect the Tiger Lake chip to bring not only a solid boost in processor power for laptops, but also impressive graphics performance from the integrated GPU.

That's not to say that the Microsoft Surface Laptop 4, which will likely use the Tiger Lake chip, will suddenly be able to compete with the best gaming laptops. But it does mean that it could have the power to beat out the current MacBook Air.

Furthermore, the potential performance of the Tiger Lake chip may serve as a warning that Apple needs to ensure that its own designed chips have adequate CPU and GPU performance to be competitive with Intel's upcoming chips. Apple plans to effectively ditch Intel's chips with the Apple Silicon initiative, and plans to use its own silicon slices based on the ARM architecture for future 2020 and 2021 MacBooks and iMacs.

Intel's new Tiger Lake chips are expected to appear in new and refreshed ultra-portable notebooks around October. And if notebook makers can deliver great performance without increasing the size of their notebooks, we may see Windows 10 notebooks that displace the 13-inch MacBook Pro and MacBook Air.