Why hype something that is 2 years away, when you have a product coming later this year?
Atleast to me this seems like, they are not particularly confident of Alder Lake.
Wall Street needs confidence that Intel can continue to advance its technology. Remember the stock sell off when intel announced last year that its 7nm node was delayed?
Intel was under pressure to show it can continue to execute. Then Apple left intel for its own designs. If a high profile customer like Apple leaves, then others might get spooked and leave as well. And then Apple released M1, which is insanely efficient at what it does and embarrassed intel. And on top of that, AMD is cooking Intel with Zen3 in server, mainstream desktop, and for the first time in a long time, laptop.
These factors combine to paint intel in a very bad light, as it is a poor choice of a cpu manufacturer, possibly inspiring other intel customers to abandon ship. And If that’s the case, then the stock price will plummet, and investors will lose confidence. Death spiral.
Therefore, Intel had no choice but to restore confidence in its ability to supply the PC ecosystem with superior products. And the way to restore confidence is to deliver solutions. Therefore, they had to hype Alder Lake at CES2021, as well as show that Meteor Lake is on track. They had to deliver tiger lake H. They had to pound their noses to the grind stone and find ways to deliver solutions. It’s all about restoring confidence. Gelsinger understands human emotion.
And in the end, we are witnessing why competition is good to consumers. Gone are the days of incremental updates from intel or quad core after quad core. AMD brought innovation to the x86 ecosystem, Apple left and innovated with M1, and if intel wants to stem the erosion of its market share, then it has to adapt, or eventually die.
