It wasn’t the first such demo, but it was most certainly the biggest: Intel this week finally showed off its coming 10nm Core and Xeon chipsets to a big audience at CES, and promised to deliver this long-awaited milestone by late 2019.

“Anyone can claim leadership in an isolated use case, but at Intel our aim is broader,” Intel’s Gregory Bryant said, in an ironic nod to the company’s inability to ship 10nm chips in anything other than isolated cases so far. “The next era of computing demands innovation at an entirely different level – one that encompasses the entire ecosystem and spans every facet of computing, connectivity and more. We won’t settle for anything less.”

Intel customers have been settling for out-of-date 14 nm chipsets for years, but it looks like that’s going to change later this calendar year: The processor giant said this week that it would deliver its first 10nm chipsets, codenamed Ice Lake, by the fourth quarter of 2019 and in time for the holidays. That’s about three and a half years later than originally promised.

Based on Intel’s Sunny Cove architecture, Ice Lake will include both Core and Xeon chipsets and, like all Intel processor families, will ship over a period of time. The first versions will support Thunderbolt 3 and Wi-Fi 6 out of the box, and it will support hardware-accelerated AI and graphics capabilities.

In addition to Ice Lake, Intel also showcased other upcoming hardware technologies.

Among them:

Project Athena. A PC maker partner program to help usher in a new age of 5G- and AI-based PCs. Most major PC makers are on board, as is Microsoft.

Lakefield (Preview). This coming hybrid PC architecture will be packaged in a new 3D manufacturing technology and will allow for even thinner and lighter PC designs.

More 9th-generation Core processors. Intel is expanding its 9th-generation Core chipsets to support a broader spectrum of desktop computers with world-class performance.

Cascade Lake. The firm’s upcoming Xeon processor family will support Optane DC persistent memory, and Intel DL Boost for accelerated AI. It will ship in the first half of 2019.

Tagged with Intel