12 PCWorld JANUARY 2021NEWS INTEL WELCOMES AMD & ARM COMPETITION
And I take all competition, whether that’s from
Apple or the other ARM guys, Qualcomm,
MediaTek or AMD—I take that all very
seriously.”
“Anytime you’re a growth business and a
healthy business, there’s going to be
competition,” Bryant said in a talk with
investment bank UBS as well as with Yahoo!
Finance. “We absolutely intend to compete
and to grow. And we feel good about our
performance and our road map.”
The road map looks busy for both laptops
and desktops. Bryant said Tiger Lake H would
come out in the first half of next year in
laptops, along with Rocket Lake for desktops.
Following that, Bryant said Alder Lake would
hit in the second half of 2021.
Although Bryant didn’t detail those
upcoming chips, Tiger Lake H is likely a
higher-wattage, more powerful version of its
popular 10nm 11th-gen Tiger Lake chip. Tiger
Lake itself has performed beyondexpectations, he said, with sales 30 percent
higher than expected.
Rocket Lake is expected to be a more
modern core design mapped onto Intel’s
existing 14nm process. Alder Lake (go.
pcworld.com/alke) could be a change-up for
Intel, as it appears to be built as a mobile part
that combines little cores and big cores, like
some Arm chips already do. Intel once turned
up its nose at such designs, but apparently
that’s all water under the bridge now.
If nothing else it’s clear that the PC, once
expected to die off, is enjoying a new lease
on life. Bryant said that while consumers and
business snapped up all the laptops (go.
pcworld.com/cnsn) as the pandemic hit,
Intel also saw desktop growth during Q2 and
Q3. He said Intel expects that to continue as
well. “The desktop is obviously critical for
that kind of high-end workstation content
creation as well as high-end gaming
business,” he said.
Intel calls
Alder Lake a
“performance
hybrid.”