CES Press Day: NVIDIA, Samsung, and Intel

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

Intel

The next event was on Intel turf, which started with a one-woman concert showing the power of computers powered by Intel chips to generate the entertaining intro. After the expected series of impressive demos, there were a number of well-received announcements as Intel rounded out its ninth-generation Core CPUs with six new processors, going from low-priced but competent i3 models to high-end i9s. After years of waiting for 10-nm chips from Intel, it sounds like we'll get some this year from the new desktop Ice Lake CPUs to Lakefield chips that will bring together Sunny Cove cores with some Atom CPUs in one CPU package to balance high and power performance when needed with low power, but capable CPU workings when that is all that is needed—all in one CPU.

We also caught a glimpse of Intel's next Nervana AI processor, which will focus more on inference capabilities and not just deep learning. It seems that Intel’s 10-nm development is on track. The reveal of Ice Lake—Intel's 10nm CPU microarchitecture—comes after they had years of delays in debugging their 10-nm processors. This advancement in CPUs is expected to bring performance and power efficiency gains over Intel's current 12-nm CPUs. It is expected that the first computers with Ice Lake will start hitting shelves by the end of the year. Hopefully, the CPUs will be available this year to those of us who build our own.

Intel admits that everything is connected today—phones, tablets, smart devices, wearables, everything!—but the PC is the focal point of all of this. Without the PC, none of this ecosystem would work well. We are entering a new era of computing with the new Core i9-9900K ninth-generation processors announced from i3 to the supercomputer like i9. Also, Ice lake includes WiFi 6 (more on WiFi 6 in an upcoming article). The new script will now be enabled, which can categorize searching through hundreds of your pictures in different files and folders, and pictures that were never categorized or named accordingly. You will be able to find what you want based on how you categorize them. For example, you will be able to search for all pictures that have water or snow in them, etc.

Dell announced at the Intel event that computers from them running Ice Lake have 1- nm CPUs coming. Dell also announced that the next area of mobile computing (super thin and light notebooks) under the name of “Project Athena,” which is next-generation of mobile computing just as their Ultrabook was some years ago.

In addition to the PC category, data centers—which are the real force behind most things—will get the opportunity to use the New Xeon, which is code-named “Cascade Lake.” It’s designed to process the world’s data using a powerful 48-core CPU with AI deep learning and Optane persistent memory (persistent memory means that data will maintain in the memory even if the power is out). This new hardware will be used in what appears to be extremely impressive 3D athlete tracking. Further, this technology will be used at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, so when you see it, remember that you read it here first.

Almost as an afterthought, it was announced that the 5G modem is coming in the second half of 2019. In addition, Snow Ridge 10-nm architecture for 5G is coming, and in late 2019, we will see the Intel Nervana neural network processor (NNP).

So, what does this all mean? I would say that the rate of technological advancement is about to accelerate and we haven’t seen anything yet!

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