Intel is set to “make a serious announcement” at the Tokyo Games Show tomorrow afternoon… or morning, or this evening, depending on your current geography. It has pre-announced the announcement on Twitter, via the official Intel Japan account, with the assertion that whatever it has to say will have an impact on PC games in 2020.
Or at least that’s what the Google translation says anyway. My own Japanese is a little rusty, and I’m not sure I can rely on that. Still, there’s definitely something going down at the Tokyo Games Show tomorrow on the Intel stand and I’m fascinated to see what that could be.
So, let’s play a little game of Intel tech speculation… What could the big blue chip making machine be announcing at the Tokyo show? We’ve already had the unveiling of the Intel World Open, an Olympics-adjacent esports tournament scheduled for a finale ahead of the Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony next year, so it’s probably not that. And anyways, that’s just for Street Fighter 5 and Rocket League.
Which means it has to be something else. The announcement will happen at the Intel booth on the Tokyo Games Show floor, at 1.30pm local Japanese time – which would be 9.30pm tonight US Pacific time, or 5.30am morning Friday UK time – and the translation states that Intel “will make a serious announcement regarding PC games for 2020.”
インテルからの重大発表！
明日13:30 から東京ゲームショウのインテルブースで2020年に向けたPCゲームに関する重大発表を行います。どんな内容が飛び出すか、楽しみにお待ちください！ #TGS2019 #インテルでゲーミング #intel pic.twitter.com/KgcZnHB6Dt
— インテル【公式】 (@IntelJapan) September 12, 2019
There is the Intel Core i9 9900KS, which is set to launch next month, that’s likely to be touted as “the fastest CPU for gaming” when it gets launched owing to its 5GHz clock speed and the fact that even at eight cores it will outpace the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X when it launches at the end of this month. But that’s not really going to impact PC games in 2020, with the desktop Comet Lake chips set to arrive next year touting a full 10-core flagship…
So maybe that’s it; the announcement of the Intel Core i9 10900K coming in 2020. But that would rob the 9900KS of any rumbles of thunder it might currently possess, so a Comet Lake announcement seems unlikely too.
We haven’t heard anything from the Intel Xe team for a while, and that’s surely the piece of tech that’s going to have the biggest impact on PC games in 2020 from an Intel perspective. I’d love to see Intel pop up at its booth with a physical prototype of the Intel Xe graphics card, even if it’s just a non-functional shroud to give us an idea of what it’s actually going to look like when we get one into our rig next year.
Maybe Raja himself will pop up with some more details about the new GPU, magicing up some ray tracing support, go into how it will perform, and whose graphics card it’s going to kick in the shaders from the red or green team.
To be honest, that’s all probably too much to hope for. While I’d love it to be a physical teaser of Intel’s first discrete gaming GPU I expect we’re going to be less enthused about whatever the actual ‘serious announcement’ is tomorrow.
But keep an eye on Japan, and we’ll find out soon enough…
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