Chipzilla made several announcements about its new Core i9-based modular NUC, “Ghost Canyon,” how its 10th-gen Comet Lake chips will run above 5GHz and how its upcoming Tiger Lake CPUs will have improved AI performance.
Greg Bryant, executive vice president of its Client Computing Group updated the gathered throngs about Project Athena, the thin-and-light specification that Intel helped develop. Intel has verified 25 Project Athena devices, Bryant said. In 2020, that number will be doubled to more than 50, Bryant continued—including a new dual-screen specification.
Intel representatives showed off two Project Athena laptops: the Acer Swift 3 and the HP Elite Dragonfly. Bryant highlighted the Project Athena partnership with Google for Chromebooks, including the Asus Chromebook Flip C434 and Samsung Galaxy Chromebook announced at CES.
Intel's Chris Walker made a surprise entrance with another concept: “Horseshoe Bend”, a full 17-inch foldable PC. Like the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold, Horseshoe Bend can be a single-screen display or tablet, or a dual-screen device, and it's a lot bigger than Lenovo's offering.
Bryant pledged 5G support for PCs, with a partnership with Mediatek, with samples available in the third quarter of 2020. Originally, Intel had claimed that the partnership wouldn't yield fruit until 2021.
Bryant then switched gears to the silicon inside the devices themselves, with an emphasis on AI.
It is still unclear if Tiger Lake will be a 10th- or 11th-gen part. Intel’s 10th-gen parts have been split between Comet Lake and Ice Lake, but the next codeword to pay attention to is Tiger Lake.
That chip is supposed to be 10nm and is “coming soon” to laptops, according to a promotional video Intel played.
Bryant appeared to claim that Tiger Lake would offer a “double-digit” performance increase over the prior generation. Lisa Pearce, vice president of Intel architecture, graphics and software, who joined Bryant onstage, claimed there would be a “huge leap” in graphics performance, presumably due to the inclusion of Xe graphics cores.
Intel unveiled DG1, its first discrete GPU for consumers, at its press conference January 6 at CES in Las Vegas. The first implementation may be just a prototype and Chipzilla offered no details. However, Intel did allow pictures of the chip to be taken.
