Intel Innovation 2022: live updates from Raptor Lake launch | Digital Trends

The opening keynote of Intel Innovation is over, but Gelsinger has already showed up in the post-show wrap-up, talking about the energy in the room and some of the major themes of the show. Gelsinger is such a relatable figure in the industry, and his roots as a developer who started his career at Intel continues to be referenced and put forth as core to Intel’s new identity.

Intel has brought up a special guest, Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel. Gelsginer has given him a signed copy of the book he wrote on x86 development, which Torvalds said was his way into developing Linux himself. Torvalds spoke about his upbringing and called himself a “plodding engineer,” rather than someone who has some grand vision for the future of open source technology. Gelsinger ended the segment by awarding Torvalds the first Intel Innovation award for his contribution to the open source community.

The head of Samsung Display has been brought on stage to showcase the world’s first PC with a slidable display. Seeing that screen pull directly out was a pretty neat demo, even if it was just on a static image. The tablet is essentially turned from a 13-inch screen up to a 17-inch one, which looks pretty handy. The Samsung representative mentioned it as the next step forward in display innovation from folding displays, which are just now becoming available in some products.

Finally, the moment we’ve been waiting for! Gelsinger has officially announced the 13th-gen Raptor Lake family of chips. The big features are enhanced E and P cores, which combine in this hybrid architecture to result in the best single-threaded and multi-threaded performance, according to Gelsinger. Up to 5.8GHz on the high-end chip, with even a 6GHz model previewed to launch in 2023.

A developer from Inflexion Games has been brought on stage, to showcase how Intel’s hybrid architecture aids in development. The developer is working on the game, Nightingale, and has mentioned that often in game development, they can only have one instance of the game world open at once, but in this system they have on stage, up to four or even eight instances can be open at the same time, which the developer says can significantly speed up development.

Gelsinger and crew are demonstrating how building AI models can be applied to coffee harvesters, training a model to get better yields out of coffee beans. Gelsinger has announced Intel Getti to capitalize on getting the ability to create computer vision models out to more developers and industries. The next demo is Chipotle, and in this case, computer vision models are being shown to help restaurants stay stocked, keep ingredients fresh, and even ensuring order accuracy, all run by small form factor edge devices. Intel cameras are mounted above the service lines, and they can detect the ingredients in real-time. The CTO from Chipotle was shown in a video clipping, noting that a full deployment of the Intel technology is coming to a large market in the coming months.

Gelsinger has brought up a colleague on the stage to showcase her career, talk about Intel’s commitment an open ecosystem, and show some AI demos on 4th-gen Intel Xeon processors, but let’s just talk quickly about what the company is doing with the Arc A770. Gelsinger specifically mentioned how much people are complaining about the average price of GPUs today, and how Intel’s answer to that problem is the $329 A770. How these cards end up performing is still to be determined, but the messaging is clear: Intel wants to counter what Nvidia is doing with its sky-high graphics prices by launching its first gaming GPU as something the average PC gamer can actually afford.

Conversation around graphics is up next. Gelsinger mentions that graphics has always been a passion of his, and now that he’s back, he wants to finish. He has announced the Intel Data Center GPU Flex, and held the product up for display. Next, Gelsinger showcased the Ponte Vecchio for high-powered supercomputers, and ended with the Arc A770 card for gamers. Gelsinger says reviews are already being shipped out to reviewers.

Gelsinger is talking about everything that’s needed to drive forward the future of compute. In addition to the four major talking points, Gelsinger is touching on UCIe, the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express, an open standard that all major foundries have agreed to. Short videos clips of Samsung and TSMC were shown, pledging their partnership in supporting UCIe.

Gelsinger is speaking about the ubiquitous technological superpowers of the modern world, even using his own hearing aid that he pulled out of his ear as an example. He’s moving on to compute as the example of Intel’s contribution to this technology, proudly stating that Moore’s Law isn’t dead, as other companies have claimed. Gelsinger says Intel wants to be the stewards of Moore’s Law. Intel has put its roadmap of nodes on the screen to remind us of how aggressively the company is pushing ahead with nodes.

After a delightfully old-school introduction, CEO Pat Gelsinger has taken to the stage in front of the live audience. This is the first tech event that feels like the tech events of the old days, and it’s giving me the warm fuzzies of nostalgia.