Gadgetory

- Hey guys, this is Austin. Here at Computex, Intel has gotten serious about the future of the laptop. Intel sponsored our trip here to take a look at some of the biggest changes to laptops that we've seen in nearly a decade. The first phase of this is Project Athena. Now, this might not have the sexiest code name, but this really has the potential of being the biggest shift to laptops that we've seen, ever since Intel introduced the Ultrabook back in like, was it like 2013? But essentially what we're getting here is a guaranteed nine hours of real world use out of a Project Athena laptop. And this is not like a demo that a lot of other manufacturers use where they turn off WiFi, turn the screen brightness down like watching video. No, this is actual real world benchmarking, so Intel actually kind of walk us through some of those things that they do. And it's actually really impressive. So not only do they run these tests like 30 times, but they run it with a wide range of different apps open. So we're talking about having like Chrome and a bunch of different tabs, you have multiple programs open you're actually doing real work on a laptop, which is of course what we all do. I mean, come on. It's great to see 20 hours of battery life on a spec sheet. But unless you can actually get something like that in the real world, it's not super relevant. So it's nice to see that nine hours is actually the real goal, and in fact, you actually have to hit that to be certified as a Project Athena laptop. Another aspect here is performance and especially responsiveness. So a lot of times the system will perform very well when you're actually plugged in. But as soon as you unplug it, it goes into a very restrictive battery mode, it really slows things down. This is not going to be an issue with Athena laptops. And on top of that, there are a bunch of other small but important quality of life improvements. We're talking about less than one second to actually turn the computer on when you open it up for it to come up from sleep. We're talking about less than two seconds between when you actually turn it on and when you can be on online, so you don't have to sit around waiting. I mean, come on. Imagine you pull your phone out of your pocket and you wait two seconds for it to boot up and five seconds for it to get on WiFi. I mean, that's just not a thing that we deal with on the mobile side. So it makes sense that this is some of the next major goal on the actual laptop side to make it as quick and snappy as possible. There are a lot of other things that are included in the spec such as WiFi 6 as well as better AI performance, but really boils down to these two things. better battery life in real world scenarios and better performance no matter whether you're plugged in or on the go. I mean, quite honestly, why would you not want to take advantage of this? Now I will say this is not a mandatory thing. So not all 10th gen laptops will be Athena certified. But it is one of these things where if they do take advantage of this program, and Intel is offering a lot of additional help for, you know, designing and tuning these laptops to make sure that they're qualifying, it means that everyone is going to get a better system, right? I mean, it's not like you need some magic new processor, giant battery. It mean it's literally just a lot of work on tuning. It's a lot of work on software. It's a lot of work to make sure the laptop performs well and performs well for a much longer period. - [Ken] It's an innovation play. - It's innovation play. Thank you. Look to you with all of the buzzwords. It has started raining here in Taipei, but that will not stop me from talking about probably the biggest announcement from Intel here at the show the brand new 10th generation Intel Core processors. So there's a lot to unpack here, a lot of specs and a lot of new features. So one of the big ones is that this is the first brand new architecture that Intel has used in quite a while. It is their 10 nanometer. And while we've talked a little about in the past, this is the proper full on version which we will be able to see on all kinds of different devices very shortly. On top of that, we also have a brand new Sunny Cove CPU core, we have a brand new gen 11 graphics core, as well as things such as, integrated Thunderbolt 3 as well as WiFi 6. Is that enough speeds and feeds for you? If we break this down this is the first all new architecture we've seen from Intel since Skylake all the way back in 2015. Now a big part of this is the updated 10 nanometer process. Now it's certainly not a be all end all. What it means is they can fit more transistors into a smaller package. And because they've paired that with a bunch of new architecture upgrades, it means that this is a full on generational upgrade that we haven't seen in quite a while from Intel. It's easy just to talk about that 10 nanometer, but the fact that we have a brand new CPU core also is going to give us much more performance. So Intel is gone on record as saying that we can expect up to an 18% IPC improvement. Now that basically means that at the exact same clock speed as the last generation you're going to get 18% more performance. And that my friends is a big, big jump. I mean, usually you see like five percent, maybe seven percent. So seeing a full 18% is a big deal. Now we don't know the exact clock speeds. So that's the only kind of main thing that I'm waiting to actually try. But they have gone on record as saying we should expect 4GHz+ so, as long as we're in the roughly same range as last time, but with the better IPC. Means there's actually a major performance increase coming to CPUs on the laptop and hopefully the desktop side pretty soon. The graphic side is actually seen a bigger boost. So with the brand new Gen 11 graphics on board, we're actually expecting up to a doubling of performance. And that was very sorely needed, because the last generation Intel integrated graphics were, fine for normal use but they were not particularly powerful for anything beyond that. However now, not only do we have the acceleration for apps such as like Photoshop, and just kind of keeping the UI nice and smooth, but importantly you actually can do some gaming on these new GPUs. Not a lot mind you, but for some basic titles 1080p should be totally usable. Now the other major advantage is we have much better display outs. So before we were limited to like one 4k monitor. However, now we can do two 4k monitors, we can also do a 5k monitor, or you can do a single 120 hertz 4k monitor of the integrated graphics on your Intel GPU. That is actually really cool. And it means that things like Thunderbolt displays are going to be much more useful. So the 10th generation Intel Core processors are starting with the Ice Lake-U series, which is the 15 watt chips that are generally found and things like thin and light laptops, so it will be a quad core design. So it's not a huge jump like we've seen in the past. But with all these architecture improvements, it should be a pretty big deal. Now we will of course expect to see Ice Lake and 10th gen expand beyond just a laptop, but as of right now we just have these, although they will be going on sale later this year. So you will be able to get Ice Lake in 10th gen and everything like that, in a system before too much longer. And in fact, we actually got to spend a little bit of time with a couple of these, including the Dell XPS 13, which only has a killer build. But importantly it has that properly powerful, Ice Lake CPU inside. I can't wait to tear into it and see exactly what it can do. Because it's nice to see all these numbers and sort of what Intel claims and everything, but I want to get my hands on these things and really see what they can do. To put all this in context I was able to spend a few minutes with one of the senior VPs from Intel, Gregory Bryant to talk not only about 10th gen but more importantly, what it means to you. Dude, great to meet you. - Great to see you, yeah. - So this is an awesome set. - It is, its a nice one, yeah. - It is a great stage. So there's a lot of stuff that you guys are talking about at Computex, right. So one of the main things is definitely 10th gen right? - That's right. - So obviously 10 nanometer has had a long process. It's been quite the sort of ordeal to get here, but it seems like it's in a good spot now, right? - It is, I mean, it's, it's taken a lot of work from the team to get the products ready. We've got multiple OEMs that we're showing on stage at the event where their products that will be shipping ahead of this holiday season. - 10th is just the Ice Lake-U right now, correct? - Yeah, that well, we're gonna do a whole family of Ice Lake products. - Okay. - The first one out is the Ice Lake-U product 4+2 which you talked about, yeah. - Which just makes a lot of sense, right? Because obvious the process is one thing, but it is one aspect, I mean, you look at 14, right. I mean, obviously Intel's been on 14 for a long time. - Yeah. - But you look at like sort of like Broadwell to now, the huge gains you see all across the board. - That's right. - And frequency, you can see that it's obviously not just like, oh, slap a 10 nanometer badge on call it a day. - No, no that's great that you pick up on that, we made huge improvements across 14 as we delivered it kind of 70% improvement start to finish. And we're just starting on the 10 journey, and we'll improve it as we go. And then we had, we recently had an investor day where we talked about 7 nanometer technologies. - Which is on track now. - Yeah, for the first time and we said, hey, we'll have 7 nanometer products out for 2021. So you know, we feel - It's awesome. - We feel much better about our roadmap and and we're excited to get new products to market. - This turned out to be a surprisingly big Computex for Intel. We got 10 nanometer, brand new CPU, GPU, all kinds of stuff. And the most exciting thing is that we're actually going to get our hands on it in a few months. Now we'll have to see exactly how it performs. But I've got to say if it's anything like what they've claimed, I am very, very excited. If you guys are interested in any of this stuff. I will have links to check it out in the description. (soft music)