Intel is making some big changes to its desktop gaming roadmap to deliver faster performance, with new hardware & software technologies.
Intel Says They Want To Match AMD X3D CPUs By Changing Their Entire Gaming Desktop Strategy Over the Next Five Years
In an interview with PCGameshardware, Robert Hallock has shared the plans of the client CPU team covering desktops, laptops, and handheld PC markets. Robert has been giving us some hints of their strategy over the past few weeks, and it looks like Intel is on the right path.
A key change in Intel's desktop strategy came around after taking a look at the current desktop market and what its competition is doing. Intel saw that AMD's X3D CPUs have been doing really well in the consumer segment, and it's important for companies to never underestimate the competition. With such an X3D having such a large influence on the market, Intel was "thoughtful" about where it would take its own roadmap. So, to that, Intel has done a lot of work to change its gaming roadmap over the next five years.
Intel Desktop Strategy Moving Forward: More Optimizations, Socket Longevity, More Enthusiast Features For Everyone
Talking about improvements in its next-gen architectures, such as Nova Lake, Robert says that latency matters more than core frequency these days. This is first indicated in the Core Ultra 200S Plus family, where improvements in the inter-chip latency led to some decent performance gains while keeping the frequencies the same.
Intel has also made some software-side updates, and we already discussed this in another post. Essentially, a new architecture or hardware upgrade is meaningless these days, as per Intel. If you want more performance, then you want software and scheduler optimizations. Intel's Binary Optimization Tool and the ongoing Thread Director / APO updates have also proven this.
There is more technology, of course, that we can bring in into the roadmap that will continue to drive latency down for gaming. And we've made a number of changes to our gaming roadmap on desktop to do that.
It depends on the products, but I think we're headed in a direction that will make people happy. That makes Intel the company, again, that things are looking for. That's what I want to deliver from my team.
I want to deliver great gaming CPUs for really fast gaming desktop PCs.
And I need to make sure that when I have a very large core count device, right, not an 8 core, not a 6 core, but something with more, you know, 24 cores or more, that the threads go to the right place. Because that too is a form of latency. And a thread director would be very, very helpful.
I truly believe, and this might get me in trouble, but I truly believe that the general PC gaming market, and especially enthusiasts, like really hardcore PC enthusiasts, are significantly underestimating the importance of software to the PC experience, like really, really seriously. It is, there is no game on earth that is as fast as it's going to be purely through hardware.
Robert Hallock - Intel
Talking about a larger cache in general, Robert calls it a "Brute Force Hammer" that doesn't help with every workload. Large caches are useful in workloads that have a high amount of random requests to the memory, which are mostly console-first games or those built on older APIs such as DX9 and DX11. But newer APIs or PC-optimized games show little benefit with a larger cache.
That has led Intel to develop BOT (Binary Optimization Tool), which squeezes out that last 10,20,30 percent performance from a game that otherwise users would've never had access to, regardless of how much cache they have, how fast a CPU/GPU they have.
As such, Intel is doubling down on software optimizations with BOT, which may be a small project, but Robert's team has ambitious plans around it, along with what he calls a "significant overall of our hardware roadmap".
Arc G3 For Handhelds Not A Laptop-Borrowed Chip
Robert also name-dropped the Arc G3, its next-generation handheld chip designed for gaming handhelds. Robert said that while he didn't work on G3, the chip itself isn't simply borrowed from laptops; it is a brand new chip designed specifically for handhelds, so we will see some interesting performance and power figures on the devices using this chip.
Arc G3 will be based on the Panther Lake silicon, but again, they will cater towards the gaming handheld market. We expect to see the first of these handhelds by Computex, which is about a month away.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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