Intel Corp. today offered a preview of Ice Lake, its newest mobile processor, at the annual Computex event running this week in Taipei.

The new chip, set to launch next month, is an important milestone for Intel as it’s the company’s first processor to be built using its long-awaited 10-nanometer process, which has been beset with multiple delays.

Originally planned to debut in 2015, Intel was forced to push back its plans to launch a 10-nanometer chip first to 2016, in 2017 and beyond as it struggled to perfect the process. The company has never given an official reason for the delay, but it’s widely thought to have struggled with production yields.

Mastering the 10-nanometer process is critical for Intel if it’s to retain its leadership in the chipmaking industry. It refers to the size of the tiny transistors, or electrical gates, that rapidly switch on and off to perform calculations on the chip. The more transistors that can be squeezed onto a chip, the more powerful that chip will be because it means it can perform greater numbers of calculations. In addition, smaller transistors require less power, which translates to longer battery lives for the devices they power.

The good news is that Intel finally seems to have gotten things right. The company, which has also promised to debut its first seven-nanometer chips in 2021, said earlier this month Ice Lake would deliver twice the graphics performance of its current 14-nanometer chips, double the video transcoding speed and three times as much artificial intelligence compute power.

Ahead of the Computex event the company spoke more about these capabilities, claiming Ice Lake’s performance boost owes more to advances in software than hardware improvements such as core count and clock frequency. That the company would choose to stress the importance of software over hardware doesn’t come as a surprise, given that many of its rival chipmakers, including Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd., have already launched their own seven-nanometer chips several months previously.

Still, Raja Koduri, Intel’s chief architect and senior vice president of architecture, software and graphics, may well have had a point when he said: “For every order of magnitude performance potential of a new hardware architecture, there are two orders of magnitude performance enabled by software.”

In particular, Intel talked about Ice Lake’s improved performance for specialized workloads that are almost entirely down to the software baked into it. These include a substantial mobile graphics boost in video games, thanks to the Gen 11 graphics engine that’s built into the Ice Lake chips. What the new graphics engine does is it enables something called “variable rate shading,” in which variable processing power is applied to different parts of a scene to enhance rendering performance. Intel said the Gen 11 graphics should nearly double the performance over Gen 9 graphics.

Another ideal workload for Ice Lake chips is artificial intelligence. Intel says Ice Lake is its first processor designed to enable AI directly on a personal computer, thanks to the inclusion of its proprietary “Deep Learning Boost” software on the central processing unit, and additional “AI instructions” on the graphics processing unit. Ice Lake also makes use of “low power accelerators,” and Intel claims these technologies combined help the chip to perform AI inference tasks up to eight times faster than rival products.

“I am most excited to understand better which apps take advantage of DLBoost as this is a bit unclear,” said Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy. “If it can take advantage of popular photo, video, productivity and gaming apps, Intel could have an advantage here.”

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said Ice Lake shows that silicon makers are racing to deliver true artificial intelligence capabilities on the chip.

“The race is on for next-generation applications and whoever offers the best support for AI in silicon will likely be a winner,” Mueller said. “Intel’s new Ice Lake chips are great a testament for that trend.”

In addition to the new Ice Lake chips, Intel showed off a second new microchip known as the 9th Gen Intel Core i9-9900KS special edition processor. The company said this is the first chip in the world with all eight cores running at “turbo frequency” of 5 gigahertz, which makes it “the world’s best gaming desktop processor,” according to Intel.

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