Intel's Computex Keynote 2019 Live Coverage

UPDATE: Intel announced its new Ice Lake processors are shipping now. Hit our Intel Unveils 10th-Gen Core Processors, 10nm Ice Lake, 18% IPC Improvement, Sunny Cove Cores, Gen11 Graphics, Thunderbolt 3 article for the full rundown.

We're here at Intel's Computex 2019 keynote to provide live coverage of the event. We expect to hear an update on the company's 10nm processors, and perhaps an announcement around Glacier Lake, Intel's next-generation high end desktop lineup. Intel has also been spreading word of its Project Athena, which, much like the Ultrabook initiative of days gone by, is designed to improve laptop performance and efficiency.

What can Intel say to wow the crowd after AMD's announcement of its third-gen Ryzen processors yesterday? Those chips are coming with a 15% boost in IPC, a feat Intel hasn't accomplished in ages, a smaller 7nm process, and aggressive price points across the stack. We'll see what Team Blue has to say in response shortly.

The keynote, hosted by Intel's Gregory Bryant, has begun.

Gregory Bryant told us about some of the advancements in 1971, like the advent of rock and roll,and the 4004 microprocessor.

The 4004 is the first commercially available processor ever made, and it came from Intel. Bryant switched gears to talking about "the data-centric era," which signifies the rapid explosion of data from devices on the edge. Bryant touted Intel's deep ecosystem of software developers, ISVs, and OEMs to further the industry.

Intel introduced its 9th-generation Core vPro mobile and desktop processors, including a new Core i9 model for vPro. The platforms are built for professionals and enterprises. Acer, Asus, Dell, Lenovo and HP will all bring systems to market with the new processors. These are just Skylake derivatives of Intel's existing desktop processors, albeit with a few business features, like remote management and enhanced security.

Intel displayed several new vPro systems.

Bryant invited Stephen Huang from Avantech to the stage to talk about the company's vPro platforms.

Bryant announced 14 new Xeon E processors for mobile workstations and desktops. These top out at 8C/16T and 5Ghz single-core turbos. These are also Skylake derivatives for the professional market. Jason Chen from Acer came on stage and discussed the company's new Concept D platforms, which are designed for professional users with a spate of features to cater to the market. 

Bryant annouced that coming this fall Intel will launch its next X-Series of processors. These are the Glacier Lake processors, Bryant says they are going to take the Turbo Max further than two cores and also boost memory performance. Those are the only details. Intel did show a Concept D system with a next-gen X-series processor inside, but there was no demo or further details.

Jam Hsiao, an award winning artist and singer, came to stage to talk about the benefits of Intel's processors. He spoke in Chinese, so I couldn't understand. I think he said Intel's processors are great. He did a quick song with Intel's house DJ. Bryant gave Hsiao a Concept D laptop as a parting gift.

Bryant talked about the 1.2 billion gamers in the world, and how 520 million of them are PC enthusiasts looking for bleeding edge performance. That's us, folks.

A Dell executive came to stage to discuss some of the company's efforts in gaming, and also pointed out that gamers spent more money on gear last year than the global film or TV industries. That's a lot of CPUs and GPUs.

The duo discussed the 9th-gen Intel Core i9 processors, and Dell's new Alienware m15 and m17, which are available today. Dell says these are the fastest thin and light computers in the world. He also touted the impressive power delivery on the devices, which enable big performance in a thin form factor.

Dr. Lupo, a popular Twitch streamer, came on stage to talk about the Alienware systems. Lupo said the laptop lets him execute multiple multi-threaded tasks at once. They quickly transitioned to a Fortnite demo on a system powered by an 8C/16T mobile CPU wiht a 5GHz turbo.

Bryant did the 'official announcement of the Core i9-9900KS, which we have detailed coverage of from a few days ago. This processor can do an all-core boost to 5.0 GHz during regular stock use. It's basically a dynamically-overclocked Core i9-9900K. You can also overclock this special edition processor. The -9900KS comes to market in Q4.

Intel Performance Maximizer will be available for free for everyone soon. This is an automatic overclocking software that "looks at the DNA" of the processor to autotune it to optimize and automatically overclock your system. This is a MUCH needed response to AMD's Ryzen Master software. Intel demo'd the software automatically overclocking a processor to 5.0 GHz on all cores. However, the slide said it was overclocked to 5.2 GHz, which was different.

The software also does per-core overclocking, automatically finding the maximum overclock for each core on the chip.

Bryant announced the Project Atehna 1.0 specification. This project is much like the Ultrabook initiative, in that it brings the industry together to design faster and more efficient notebooks. The first Athena-inspired notebooks are being launched today.

Johnson Jhia from Lenovo came onto the stage to discuss the company's new Athena laptops.

Jhia demoed a Yoga S940 for the crowd. It weighs in at just 1.2kg and is surprisingly thin.It also features an AI-driven Smart Assist that helps automate performance optimization. It is coming to the market in time for the holidays. That system was powered by Intel's new Ice Lake processor.

Intel brought out a 10nm Ice Lake wafer. Intel announced that it is production and shipping.

Bryant announced 11 new Ice Lake SKUs. We have a full write up of the new architecture here.

Here's a snippet from our article -

Ice Lake's headline feature is an 18% increase in average instruction per cycle (IPC) throughput compared to the aging Skylake architecture, but the gains are even higher in some applications, with peaks in the 30 to 40% range for some types of workloads (albeit lower gains in others).

The boosted performance comes courtesy of Intel's new Sunny Cove cores and is a needed addition to help fight off the resurgent AMD, which recently touted a 15% improvement in IPC with its Zen microarchitecture on the 7nm process. AMD claims that its new third-gen Ryzen products have exceeded Intel's Skylake single-core performance, long the hallmark of Intel's dominating performance, albeit by small 1 to 3% margins.

Bryant also displayed a bevy of new Ice Lake laptops, like the Acer Swift, and a Dell laptop, among others.

Gregory Bryant closed out the show.

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