Intel Kicks Off Its Gaming Graphics Card Launch With a Scavenger Hunt

Intel may be gearing up to announce its first PC gaming graphics card in over two decades. On Thursday, the chip vendor posted a teaser video for the GPU, which apparently leads to an upcoming scavenger hunt involving the product.

The company has already said the graphics card, dubbed “Xe HPG,” is going to arrive some time this year. We were hoping the teaser video might reveal new information. But all we got was some splashy graphics revolving around a block of silicon, and nothing else—or so we thought. 

The video actually contains two mysterious set of numbers. The first one, at the 21-second mark, involves four rows of numbers in binary code. Wccftech realized the same numbers translate into the digits 35.160.237.208, which turns out to be an IP address that leads to an Intel website, xehpg.intel.com.

The website greets you with the words “Welcome to the Xe HPG Scavenger Hunt,” which will apparently launch on Friday, March 26 at 9 a.m. PST. It cryptically says visitors should come back on the date to “enter your secret code.”

On March 23, Intel’s new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, is holding an event to discuss the company’s future, so maybe it will hand out the code then. 

It’s also possible the secret code refers to the second mysterious number present in the teaser video. At the 17-second mark, the number sequence 79.0731W appears. Since then, users have noticed 79.0731W may refer to geographic coordinates, but who knows?

We’ll have to wait and see. But we suspect the scavenger hunt will ultimately involve puzzles across the internet that can be decoded to reveal the Xe HPG’s specs. 

It’s certainly good to see more competition in the graphics card market, especially as demand for AMD’s and Nvidia’s GPUs has been outstripping supplies. However, Intel’s Xe HPG probably won’t provide relief for consumers in the short-term. The company is going to avoid making the card using its own foundries. Instead, Intel is tapping an outside manufacturer, likely the already capacity-strained TSMC, to build the graphics cards.