For the last several years Intel has been cranking up its GPU game, and it’s just about ready to step up to Nvidia and AMD with discrete “Arc” graphics cards of its own—at least in some places. But the company is never working on just one thing, and in the latest press release for the Arc graphics platform, Intel is hyping something it calls “Project Endgame.” What is that, aside from a flimsy justification to use Marvel characters in a PCWorld header image?
Intel’s being coy with the precise details of the project, only offering a few more details than it did last month. But it does clearly have something to do with streaming high-end games from the cloud, and possibly other graphics-intense programs.
Project Endgame is a unified services layer that harnesses computing resources everywhere – cloud, edge, and your home, to improve your gaming, and non-gaming, PC experiences. With Project Endgame, we can untether our users from their local hardware specs.
A “unified services layer” could mean a lot of different things, from a business-to-business tool for giving local programs a little processing oomph via remote servers (more likely) to a full-on game streaming service aimed at consumers (much less likely). It could also be something of a combination of the two, using huge datacenter power to enhance the performance of your home machine.
This is all a bit of indulgent guesswork on our part, though. Intel says it will “take [its] first public steps” to reveal Endgame in the second quarter of this year. We’ll just have to wait and see what the company has for us.
