Intel has announced that it is going to launch their 9th generation ‘Coffee Lake’ Core CPUs for mainstream and high-performance laptops in the second quarter of this year. The company has not yet shown specifics of the models to be launched but says that the lineup will include new Core i9 mobile CPUs which will be used in top-end laptops for gaming and digital content creation. The teaser was part of Intel’s presence at the on-going Game Developers’ Meeting in San Francisco since Intel is going to be focusing on game players who want premium quality background graphics at great framerates in the advanced games, almost all while streaming at the same time.

The new CPU models promise a lot more power for gaming and content creation within standard laptop form factors. As part of the platform refresh, 9th Gen Core CPUs will support Gigabit-class Wi-Fi 6 and Intel Optane Memory for low-latency communication and storage.

Even though the company actually did not make announcements about any specifications or even model numbers, Techspot reported a leak last month pointing to two new models in each of the Core i9, Core i7, and Core i5 tiers. The purported top-end Core i9-9980HK model is told feature eight cores with Hyper-Threading for a total of 16 threads, and a top boost speed of 5GHz. A little cut-down Core i9-9980H would run at up to 4.8GHz. The two Core i7 models in the allegedly leaked list were the Core i7-9850H and Core i7-9750H, both with six cores and Hyper-Threading enabled. Boost data transfer speeds for the two are considered to be 4.6GHz and 4.5GHz respectively. And finally, the purported Core i5-9400H and Core i5-9300H are both said to have four cores with Hyper-Threading, running at up to 4.3GHz and 4.1GHz respectively.

Even though Intel hasn’t confirmed this, the upcoming 9th Gen laptop CPUs should be based on the same ‘Coffee Lake’ architecture as the desktop 9th Gen family launched late this past year. They must also be created using Intel’s latest 14n++ process technology. With a Q2 2019 release timeframe, we can anticipate seeing laptops based upon these new processors no later than the annual Computex trade show in the last week of May.

Next, Intel made the announcement their new GameDev Boost marketing programme and ‘Runs Great on Intel’ certification for game developers. Intel will provide tools including software libraries, performance analyzers, and tutorials to help out developers code their games to operate on Intel hardware more efficiently. This will assist the company to compete against AMD and Nvidia, which have been running similar efforts for years.

And finally, Intel made the announcement a research collaboration with Spirit AI to address toxicity in gaming, using AI including voice recognition to allow for more active moderation of voice chats in online multiplayer games. Online harassment and bullying in games have grown to be big problems.