Intel's first discreet GPU is coming, along with bendable laptops

Intel's long been the big dog in CPUs –– though AMD continues to nip at its heels –– but it's largely left the GPU game to others. Today it announced its first discreet GPU, the DG1, is in the works. But, the company told attendees at its CES press conference precious little more about it.

There'll doubtless be some design overlaps with the 10nm Tiger Lake chips Intel talked up at the same event, but how much we don't know. What we do know is that Intel says the integrated graphic processors on the new Tiger Lake chips will offer twice the performance of their predecessors, so we'd expect even more from a dedicated chip. Tiger Lake will also, as expected, bring Wi-Fi 6 and Thunderbolt 4 to future devices.

New form factor and a folding ThinkPad –– The other genuinely new thing Intel announced wasn't a chipset at all, instead, it's the "Horseshoe Bend" form factor that it expects ever more laptop makers to use. The key example Intel showed off on stage was new folding ThinkPad X1 Fold from Lenovo. We've seen the bendy ThinkPad teased before, but Intel confirmed it'll actually come to market later in 2020.

Much of Intel's presentation (too much, by our reckoning) was spent on talking up its past successes and potential applications for its chipsets, along with the requisite buzzwords like "5G", "self-driving" and "AI", and some future use cases.

Sports will get more interactive –– The most exciting of these –– and one of the most concrete –– is its work with sports broadcasters to voxel 3D tracking of sports events. Voxel tracking enables the post-play sweep arounds and fabricated angles seen in TV broadcasts of NFL and NBA games. For now, that processing takes time, but Intel says it'll be capable of lagless processing by the end of 2020.

In other words, the future is coming according to Intel. But like ubiquitous 5G, it's not quite here yet.