‘See a transition from mobile to PC gaming in India’: Intel India exec

Intel India introduced its 13th generation of desktop processors in India on Tuesday. The company is also confident that some of the trends seen during the pandemic — such as increase in PC gaming in the Indian market — will continue to hold ground. “Because of the pandemic, there was an increased demand for laptops as well as desktops for learn from home/work from home usages. But as schools and offices opened up, we expected that demand to decline – and yes it is optimizing – but there are a few long-term trends that are here to stay. And one of these is the growth in gamers,” Akshay Kamath, Director PC Client Sales, Intel India told at the sidelines of the launch event.
Kamath said he expects the PC gaming growth to continue in India in both notebook and desktop segments. “We see a transition happening from mobile gamers to PC gaming. We saw glimpses of that during the pandemic because when people are stuck at home, they can play on their laptop or desktop. And they did do that. PCs also offer a much richer, bigger screen and a better selection of games,” he pointed out.
According to Kamath, people are engaging with PCs “much more deeply” than before, and he is confident that refresh cycles— aka how often users upgrade to a new device—will continue to grow shorter in the country.

Coming to the new Intel 13th gen processors, the company is stressing on their prowess with “multi-threading workload.”  A workload that involves running a lot of concurrent tasks (“multi-threading workload”) is better and faster handled with more CPU threads, which is something Intel’s 13th Gen chips offer.
“This increased E-Core count definitely helps multi-threading workloads. If you’re a gamer, you’re also probably going to stream the game to your friends or on YouTube, while also recording it. So the ‘game plus stream plus record’ thing is something that is becoming quite popular, and this (increased E-Core count) is great for that kind of work,” Kamath stated.
He also stressed that Intel has made it easier for users to get into new things, especially overclocking, which in layman’s terms is the process of running a CPU at speeds faster than what manufacturers intend. For instance, Intel is also offering XTU a Windows-based performance-tuning software that enables novice and experienced enthusiasts to overclock, monitor, and stress a system. Meanwhile, IntelXMP 3.0 allows users to overclock RAM memory with unlocked Intel processors.
“The tools that we have like XTU — and for memory overclocking support we have XMP 3.0 — make it much easier for a novice overclocker to get into the game,” he added.