Intel at CES 2021: Ice, Tiger, Rocket, Jasper, and Alder Lake
by Dr. Ian Cutress on January 11, 2021 4:32 PM EST
Despite only having a 30 minute press event at this year’s annual CES trade show, Intel had a lot to discuss about its plans through the next 12 months. The company touched upon five key processor architectures and product segments that will dictate where a lot of its FY2021 will come from. This is essentially a yearly roadmap set of announcements, without actually giving us the roadmap.
Carousel Image is of Intel's Greg Bryant, GM of the Client Computing Group, presenting at CES.
We’ve had a lot of Intel news today, which we separated out into separate news posts for ease of use. This is a handy quick-use guide to click through to any of our analysis
An Evening with Intel CEO Bob Swan: Roundtable Q&A
Intel surprised us by offering a chance to ask questions to the man in charge, CEO Bob Swan. It is rare for Intel to offer access to its C-Level executives to the tech press, and as a result we had to think of some nail biters to ask him that only he could answer. Our time was short, and ended up being about 15 minutes for the half-dozen of us to ask and get answers, but it was good to hear answers relating to Intel’s fab strategy, what Intel can do when it comes to outsourcing, and whether Bob considers Intel’s technical or financial position as more important.
Hot Off The Press: Ice Lake Xeon Now In Production
Many of Intel’s recent challenges stems from its inability to drive its 10nm process into two of the key revenue generating areas for the company: desktop and server. We were expecting to see Intel’s 10nm Ice Lake Xeon Scalable at the end of last year, but it passed by without a peep. Today Intel is announcing that it has started production, although earlier in the year Intel said it was already ramping production, and other sources tell us that Intel has already launched the hardware, and is shipping to customers? It all got very confusing.
The Newest Desktop On The Block: Rocket Lake’s Core i9-11900K
Intel has been teasing its next generation Rocket Lake desktop processors for several months now, with arrows pointing to PCIe 4.0 and we already know about the backported CPU and GPU cores. There are big questions as to what this means for performance and power, and Intel answered exactly zero of our questions, but did decide to preview some of the gaming performance, as well as give us concrete numbers on frequencies. There’s also a launch of many, many 500-series motherboards.
Laptops Now Have Options: Tiger Lake 35W, Tiger Lake 45W
On the notebook side of the equation, Intel has two new product families for its OEM partners to play with. The closest to launch is the new Tiger Lake H35 series, which are Intel’s regular 15 W processors beefed up to a 35 W power mode, and scraping 5.0 GHz. A little further away is the traditional 45W H-Series processors, featuring up to eight cores. We’ve got details on both.
Business Customers Matter Too: Intel Tiger Lake gets vPro
Given the massive growth of notebook sales this year to the business sector, demand for business class notebooks is growing fast. These business notebooks need special security features, as well as out-of-band management, and thus require Intel’s vPro line of hardware. Intel is meeting that need by putting the latest 15W Tiger Lake processors into its vPro line. More details of the additional security features that come with the hardware, such as CET, in our coverage.
Chromebooks for Education: 10nm Jasper Lake Comes To Life
Here’s an announcement we weren’t really expecting to get in detail, but we’re glad we did: Intel is updating its Pentium Silver and Celeron processor line with 10nm Jasper Lake processors. What makes this an exciting launch is that these are powered by Intel’s latest generation Tremont Atom cores that do x86 a little differently than most. We can’t wait to get our hands on one, especially as they filter into Windows machines and mini-PCs. More details inside.
Alder Lake?
Mentioned briefly in our pre-show discussions under NDA at the time, while there’s no specific news on Intel’s Alder Lake platform coming later in 2021, CEO Bob Swan did tell us that it will be Intel’s most ‘power scalable’ SoC for desktop and mobile. More details to follow later in the year.
Update: Intel showed off this system during their CES press conference.
Intel said it was an Alder Lake system, up and running with Windows. Obviously early silicon and a test board so far, but it's a step in the right direction. It was confirmed for launch in the second half of the year.
Related Reading
- Interview with Intel CEO Bob Swan
- Intel at CES 2021: Overview
- Intel at CES 2021: Press Event Live Blog
- Intel Ice Lake Xeon in Production
- Intel 11th Gen Desktop Rocket Lake Core i9-11900K ‘Preview’
- Intel 11th Gen Tiger Lake-U Boosted to 35W
- Intel 11th Gen Tiger Lake-H with 8 cores
- Intel 11th Gen Tiger Lake Goes vPro
- Intel’s Next Gen Tremont Atom in Jasper Lake for Q1
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lmcd - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link
My weed burned up by sitting next to 225W Piledriver parts. Nothin left, sorry.Imagine complaining that Intel was holding back with quad cores when AMD couldn't even fit a quad-core and iGPU on the same die during that same time period! And yes, I'm counting two modules as two cores, as per the outcome of AMD's lawsuit :)
Spunjji - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link
Last 4 years*Intel absolutely artificially limited things to 4 cores. They stayed that course long past the announcement of Ryzen, and then suddenly jerked away from it when it was clear they were getting clobbered. Intel didn't even put 4 cores into ultra-low-power notebooks until AMD announced Raven Ridge. Prior to that, it was dual-core "i7" processors or nothing.
lmcd - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link
Pretty two-faced to complain about not putting quad cores in ULP notebooks then also complain about said quad core power consumption in other threads! But okay :)Qasar - Thursday, January 14, 2021 - link
maybe this is what Spunjji is kind of referring to ? video from MLID is a little old now, but could be what happened, and intel was really caught off guard by how well Zen has done.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7264Twnw_9o
timecop1818 - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link
LOL, struggling. Intel isn't struggling to come up with anything.Intel is doing great at exactly what they do best - delivering value and quality to their customers.
Their latest rocket lake stuff completely destroys AMD with less cores and less power consumption.
So did their previous stuff, but a bunch of idiots fixated on useless non-realworld benchmarks and somehow AMD got ahead of things there but still failed at normal everyday computing.
Its also funny you mentioned ECC, because AMD doesn't certify any of their shitty home CPUs for ECC, so how is that different from Intel? Apparently ECC on AMD has some problems even in server space, mostly because nobody serious uses AMD for servers so they get a lot less testing done.
So yeah, Intel continues winning while AMD continues... whining? Or I mean, AMD fans.
tamalero - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link
Whats with intel chills spawning out of nowhere?first excusing and claiming the stagnation of intel for years and the consumer milking with overrated and overpriced products.
Now this clown claims "destroys" when there are not even real reviews and the only slides say winning in GAMING only.
The fact that they had to remove TWO CORES and have HIGHER POWER to barely reach single core performance at 5.3+Ghz says a lot. They will still be below AMD in multi threaded by a large margin.
And if the rumors are right, the power budgets will be even tighter on intel's side.. so intel products will only look good on short benchmarks.
KompuKare - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link
The most likely reason for shills I can come up with is not that they are emotionally invested in a brand, but more likely they are shareholders.Intel must be worried though, if they are finally dropping the artificial not allowing memory overclocking on the next round of B chipset boards.
Beaver M. - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link
There are shills for every company. No matter how good or bad their stocks are doing.AMD shills always were liars and overhyped AMD stuff and attack Intel for the most retarded reasons.
Intel shills will always claim Intel is the best and fastest.
Nvidia shills, since Turing arrived, even claim that critically low VRAM is a good thing, while for a decade they said you can never have enough VRAM.
BMW drivers will always claim their cars are the best, and so will Tesla drivers, while in reality they are some of the most unreliable cars you can get.
Etc, etc, etc.
Spunjji - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link
@Beaver M. comes in with the "bOtH sIdEs", but apparently AMD shills are also "liars" and "retarded" (🤦♂️) while Intel shills are just ordinary shills. Okay then, very balanced analysis. 😑Beaver M. - Wednesday, January 13, 2021 - link
What? Did I insult one of your shillingers?I could repeat everything I said about each side for each side. But intelligent people can read and know that all that is included in the things I mentioned.
For example you gotta be real retarded to claim that low VRAM is something good. And of course youre also lying while saying that. Not to mention when you say Intel is the best and fastest.