Intel announced that it has “something big to share” on September 2, leading one to assume that it could be its next “Tiger Lake” processor or the debut of its Xe GPU.
Unlike Apple or Microsoft, there seems to be little clue as to what it could be. The “Drop in” invitation could be used to imply that a new processor could “connect” to an existing socket, or that a consumer-centric GPU Xe could be advertised. Intel has been teasing since CES in January, when it formally announced the Tiger Lake CPU and the existence of its first Xe modules.
At the time, Greg Bryant, executive vice president of Intel’s Client Computing Group, hinted that Tiger Lake would offer a “double-digit” performance boost over the previous generation. Lisa Pearce, vice president of architecture, graphics and software at Intel, who joined Bryant on stage at Intel’s CES presentation, said there would be a “huge leap” in graphics performance, presumably due to the inclusion of Xe graphics cores. .
Intel has been outgrowing AMD’s resurgence in CPU space. The rival company’s Ryzen Mobile 4000 chips have become first favorites in the 2020 laptop race, and the Threadripper family has captured the high-core-count market for CAD design and video editing. It is in PC games where the two will continue to fight, with Intel still claiming that its high clock speeds give it the edge on single-thread workloads like older games.
Intel hasn’t offered a standalone GPU since the days of the Intel i740, Intel’s first foray into the GPU market in 1998. That chip introduced the accelerated graphics port and lent weight to the standalone GPU market, previously populated by smaller companies. like 3Dfx, 3DLabs and ATI. Technically, Intel’s integrated GPUs make it the market leader in volume GPUs if embedded processors are included, given Intel’s predominant share of the PC processor market.
However, the first Intel Xe cards have been targeted at developers. Will we see something new in September?
