MANILA, Philippines – Rivals AMD and Intel were, as usual, in the spotlight at this year’s big gadget show, CES 2020. The two were expected to one-up each other, coming off a 2019 that saw AMD catch up with its rival thanks to its cost-effective chip series, the Ryzen 3000.

At the show, it appeared AMD got the upper hand, with many media outlets expressing genuine excitement for “Team Red” with its new products. On the other hand, many felt Intel’s announcements to be somewhat lacking firepower, focusing more on partnerships with other device makers such as Lenovo and Dell. 

Here’s a rundown of AMD announcements:

1. Ryzen 4000 mobile processors

While AMD made headway in the desktop space, Intel still has the upper hand in the laptop scene. But with the announcement of the Ryzen 4000 chips, that may change this year. These chips are expected to finally give Intel a challenge with higher clock speeds, higher instructions-per-cycle rates, and efficient energy consumption.

Laptops with these processors, which AMD says outperform equivalent Intel chips, are expected to come in Q1 2020.

2. AMD Radeon 5600 XT GPU 

The competition in the graphics scene is neck-and-neck as well. AMD surpassed Nvidia in market share for the first time in 5 years in Q2 2019 before Nvidia rebounded in latter quarters. 

AMD continues the fight with the 5600 XT, which it’s branding as the best 1080p graphics card. It will be priced at $279 – the same price as Nvidia’s 1080p king, the GTX 1660Ti. AMD says: theirs will perform better. 

3. A $4,000 superchip

AMD also introduced the Threadripper 3990X, a processor meant for those with high-end computing demands such as processing videos and massive data sets. Debuting on February 7, 2020, AMD showed a demo where the 3990X performed 30% faster than a pair of Intel Xeon processors, which cost around $20,000. 

Intel, meanwhile, had less actual products to show off during their keynote, focusing mainly on partnerships with other device makers and enterprise products. There were a few interesting announcements but details were sparse:

1. DG1 graphics chip

Everyone’s been talking about Intel’s first-ever discrete GPU solution, but now they’ve made it official. Intel announced the DG1 graphics chip. They demoed the new chip through the game Destiny 2 but other than that, Intel didn’t say when it will arrive, how much it will cost, and just how powerful it will actually be. 

Speculation around the web is that these chips will work in tandem with new Intel CPUs with integrated graphics for double the power. Currently, it feels like it’s shaping up as more of a value graphics solution than the cutting-edge tech we see from the likes of Nvidia. 

2. Tiger Lake chips 

Intel also made their Tiger Lake chips official at CES. These are chips made using the 10nm manufacturing process, and are a direct successor of late 2019’s Ice Lake chips. These have been tuned for better AI performance, better energy efficiency, and will support new standards such as Thunderbolt 4 and WiFi 6. 

Most importantly, they’re expected to be so much better at gaming thanks to the new Xe integrated graphics architecture. The chips are intended to be used in ultra-thin notebooks, and the new graphics capabilities are meant to give ultra-thin users better-than-ever graphics and multimedia performance.

3. 5G laptops

Intel, through a partnership with fellow chipmaker Mediatek, said that 5G-enabled chips will be coming to hardware partners by Q3 2020. This is part of the company’s “Project Athena” initiative which aims to fasttrack a revolution in the laptop scene.  – Rappler.com