Intel is slated to deliver the Industry Opening Keynote on the first day of Computex 2019 shortly, a presentation that by all accounts will finally give consumers a more detailed look at the first of its 10th-generation processors. Beyond shedding more light on the products Intel demoed at CES earlier this year, it’s hard to say just how much Intel is willing to tip its hand to keep AMD from upstaging its long-time rival.
Here’s everything you need to know to follow along:
How to watch
Intel’s keynote from Computex begins on Tuesday, May 28 at 1:30 p.m. Taiwan time. Here in the states, that translates to Monday, May 27 at 10:30 p.m. PST. The entire keynote will be livestreamed, available live and recorded above.
You can also follow along on Intel’s Twitter account or at its newsroom blog.
What to expect
With AMD making its own hotly anticipated keynote a day earlier — and likely to flaunt the company’s 7nm chips — Intel will probably use its address to try to fend off the main competitor by previewing its more daring initiatives for late 2019 and beyond.
The one pending release that has received the most buildup is Intel’s long-delayed 10nm Ice Lake CPU, making it the most likely announcement to take center stage. From consumers’ first glimpse of the chips at CES 2019, we know that they feature the Sunny Cove architecture, and will mark Intel’s first reduction in die size since 2014. Since then, we’ve also learned that this first wave of Ice Lake processors, scheduled to reach OEMs in time for the 2019 holiday season, will be aimed at powering mobile and 2-in-1 devices rather than full-fledged desktop machines. The base models will likely cost somewhere in the $100 to $200 range, while the overclockable “K” models will probably range from $250 to $500.
To call this a laptop upgrade is an understatement. We are now partnering with OEMs on the Project Athena standard to reinvent the laptop experience. #COMPUTEX2019 https://t.co/XWv41oTawr pic.twitter.com/qxYWEhfX6G
— Intel (@intel) May 24, 2019
As much of an achievement as the Ice Lake launch will be for Intel, considering that the company initially planned for 10nm chips to land in 2015 and have only just caught up to production demands, Intel still lags on the die size front. The flashier announcement will probably come from the ambitious Project Athena. One reason why the time might be right for Intel to illuminate it is that Taipei, the host city for Computex, is also home to one of Intel’s three Project Athena “labs,” along with Shanghai and Folsom, California. Project Athena is intended to kick off the innovation of slim, light mobile-laptop hybrids that feature longer battery life and emerging technologies like 5G wireless, with the first fruits of the initiative supposedly hitting shelves later this year.
Aside from these two major undertakings, any further revelations seem like a long shot. A product roadmap that leaked last month suggests that even a low-end desktop line of Ice Lake CPUs won’t be ready for primetime until at least 2021, with the interim Rocket Lake chips still on the 14nm die size. Intel’s rumored GPUs are also not due until at least 2020, so there’s a good chance we won’t hear about these at Computex, either.
