Despite only having a 30 minute press event at this year’s annual CES trade show, Intel had a lot to discuss about its plans through the next 12 months. The company touched upon five key processor architectures and product segments that will dictate where a lot of its FY2021 will come from. This is essentially a yearly roadmap set of announcements, without actually giving us the roadmap.

Carousel Image is of Intel's Greg Bryant, GM of the Client Computing Group, presenting at CES.

We’ve had a lot of Intel news today, which we separated out into separate news posts for ease of use. This is a handy quick-use guide to click through to any of our analysis

An Evening with Intel CEO Bob Swan: Roundtable Q&A

Intel surprised us by offering a chance to ask questions to the man in charge, CEO Bob Swan. It is rare for Intel to offer access to its C-Level executives to the tech press, and as a result we had to think of some nail biters to ask him that only he could answer. Our time was short, and ended up being about 15 minutes for the half-dozen of us to ask and get answers, but it was good to hear answers relating to Intel’s fab strategy, what Intel can do when it comes to outsourcing, and whether Bob considers Intel’s technical or financial position as more important.

 

Hot Off The Press: Ice Lake Xeon Now In Production

Many of Intel’s recent challenges stems from its inability to drive its 10nm process into two of the key revenue generating areas for the company: desktop and server. We were expecting to see Intel’s 10nm Ice Lake Xeon Scalable at the end of last year, but it passed by without a peep. Today Intel is announcing that it has started production, although earlier in the year Intel said it was already ramping production, and other sources tell us that Intel has already launched the hardware, and is shipping to customers? It all got very confusing.

 

The Newest Desktop On The Block: Rocket Lake’s Core i9-11900K

Intel has been teasing its next generation Rocket Lake desktop processors for several months now, with arrows pointing to PCIe 4.0 and we already know about the backported CPU and GPU cores. There are big questions as to what this means for performance and power, and Intel answered exactly zero of our questions, but did decide to preview some of the gaming performance, as well as give us concrete numbers on frequencies. There’s also a launch of many, many 500-series motherboards.

 

Laptops Now Have Options: Tiger Lake 35W, Tiger Lake 45W

On the notebook side of the equation, Intel has two new product families for its OEM partners to play with. The closest to launch is the new Tiger Lake H35 series, which are Intel’s regular 15 W processors beefed up to a 35 W power mode, and scraping 5.0 GHz. A little further away is the traditional 45W H-Series processors, featuring up to eight cores. We’ve got details on both.

 

Business Customers Matter Too: Intel Tiger Lake gets vPro

Given the massive growth of notebook sales this year to the business sector, demand for business class notebooks is growing fast. These business notebooks need special security features, as well as out-of-band management, and thus require Intel’s vPro line of hardware. Intel is meeting that need by putting the latest 15W Tiger Lake processors into its vPro line. More details of the additional security features that come with the hardware, such as CET, in our coverage.

 

Chromebooks for Education: 10nm Jasper Lake Comes To Life

Here’s an announcement we weren’t really expecting to get in detail, but we’re glad we did: Intel is updating its Pentium Silver and Celeron processor line with 10nm Jasper Lake processors. What makes this an exciting launch is that these are powered by Intel’s latest generation Tremont Atom cores that do x86 a little differently than most. We can’t wait to get our hands on one, especially as they filter into Windows machines and mini-PCs. More details inside.

 

Alder Lake?

Mentioned briefly in our pre-show discussions under NDA at the time, while there’s no specific news on Intel’s Alder Lake platform coming later in 2021, CEO Bob Swan did tell us that it will be Intel’s most ‘power scalable’ SoC for desktop and mobile. More details to follow later in the year.

Update: Intel showed off this system during their CES press conference.

Intel said it was an Alder Lake system, up and running with Windows. Obviously early silicon and a test board so far, but it's a step in the right direction. It was confirmed for launch in the second half of the year.

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  • Spunjji - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link

    Timecrap isn't new around here, but as with most Intel fanbots they've spiralled from trumpeting whatever Intel wins at, through pointing frantically at edge cases, all the way down to this pathetic ranting.
  • Spunjji - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link

    "Intel isn't struggling to come up with anything."
    Then why are they finally releasing a post-Skylake desktop core nearly 3 years later than intended on an outdated node? 🤔

    "completely destroys AMD"
    lolno!

    "shitty home CPUs"
    Cry harder 🤣
  • nico_mach - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link

    I have no idea why you're picking out AMD. Intel is now in third or fourth place, behind Apple, AMD and possibly Quallcomm (we'll see when MS gets their ARM stuff straightened out, if it's even possible at this point).
  • lmcd - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link

    MS "ARM stuff" is straightened out. Apple's CPU cores are just that much better than stock ARM designs. See: Windows in a VM on the Apple M1, also performing excellently.
  • PaulHoule - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link

    Intel is great at wasting die area on features that are fused off, that you can only turn on if you pay $1000's more.
  • lmcd - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link

    It's possible to defend Intel without shilling. The Rocket Lake power consumption comment is pretty wild to me -- Intel will not outperform Zen 3 on a per-watt basis while on 14nm. Desktop Ryzen is brilliant as of Zen 2. My only nitpick is that I'd like to see a basic GPU die added to the chiplet desktop architecture as an option, and I'm unimpressed that there isn't even an option.

    The ECC comment is pretty funny re: servers because it goes back to the fact that there is a substantial cost to keeping your platform locked for 4 years or whatever AMD did: its memory controllers absolutely suck compared to Intel, and it's hard to iterate when you're stuck supporting old chipsets. This isn't a new problem. It's a shame though that Intel's HEDT isn't around, because that got you amazing memory controllers vs the solid consumer ones.

    AMD's mobile though is absolutely hilarious, especially with the latest article that came out. Why is AMD releasing Zen 2 on mobile again? Simple: yields suck! Take away the chiplet design, and suddenly AMD and Intel are at parity. AMD can barely produce a bigger CPU, and that's even with a tiny, abysmal GPU. Intel can barely fit a quad core, because of its massive, underperforming (per mm^2) GPU. On mobile, space-efficient cores matter.

    It's wild to think that Nvidia could probably release a Tegra with 8x ARM X1 cores and win GPU benchmarks in x86/x86-64 games. I hope they do it but I doubt it.
  • Beaver M. - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link

    No, because AMD isnt learning much either. Just look at the WHEA errors/crashes their CPUs have right now. Actually became worse with this new generation. Prices are also still completely insane. And X570 still sucks.

    You can have schadenfreude as much as you want, but Intel failing will only hurt you as a customer. We told them not to fall for this fascistic quota crap. They didnt listen, even though the science and simple common sense proved them wrong long ago.
    It is what it is.
  • Spunjji - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link

    "fascistic quota crap"
    What are you even on about here?
  • Beaver M. - Wednesday, January 13, 2021 - link

    Theres an article on this very site about how this whole crap happened to Intel. If you would finally learn to read you would then be able to tell what I was talking about. Or maybe youre pro such fascistic behavior and thats why youre triggered. I heard theres still a lot of those around nowadays.
  • Qasar - Wednesday, January 13, 2021 - link

    Beaver M, you are hilarious :-)

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