Intel and Nvidia's chip wars
Sleek displays and dazzling screens are nice, but often it's the tech you don't see that matters most.

Start with Intel, which hosted a keynote on Tuesday ahead of CES. It unveiled a boatload of new 13th-generation processors, which will power a huge range of products. The headlining processor is in its high-power Core H-Series processor, which will be the first 24-core processor designed to be used by laptops. The chip can run up to 5.6Ghz, with eight cores dedicated for strenuous tasks like gaming and rendering. On the other end of the spectrum is the Core i3 N series, which improves the performance of entry-level laptops -- arguably a more important goal. We'll see new laptops sporting Intel's new processors announced in the days to come at CES.

Less abstract than chip performance are the upgrades they can yield. The new generation of Intel CPUs bring with them Unison, which lets iPhone and Android devices send and receive texts from your PC, as well as Thunderbolt 4, which among other improvements will set as a standard the ability to run two 4K external displays. Again, expect to see these features in product announcements over the next few days.

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Nvidia brings GeForce Now to your car.

Nvidia
Then there's Nvidia. Chief among its announcements are improvements to GeForce Now, its cloud gaming service, which allows you to stream games on laptops, phones and more. In short, the power of Nvidia's GeForce 4080 GPU is coming to the cloud. If you subscribe to the premium tier of GeForce Now -- henceforth known as GeForce Now Ultimate -- you can now stream games at 240Hz, utilize ray tracing (which significantly improves how light is rendered in-game) and DLSS 3 (which uses an algorithm to boost frame rate while retaining image quality).

Plus, GeForce Now is coming to... cars. If your car has a screen on its dash, you can game while in park. If there are screens behind the driver or passenger seats, those sitting in the back can game on the go. To start off with, Nvidia is partnering with Hyundai, BYB and Polestar.

Finally, Nvidia revealed its RTX 40 series of laptops -- laptops that will run on its mobile graphics cards. It highlighted nongaming 14-inch laptops, like the Lenovo Yoga Pro 14 and ZenBook Pro 14 with RTX 4070, 4060 or 4050 mobile chips, shipping in late February starting at $999.