Computex 2018 Highlights

Computex is an industry trade show for PC hardware manufacturers held in Taiwan. This year’s computex brought some exciting and interesting news and omissions of news. Trade show are interesting in that they basically forecast the next 6 months of products that companies will release.

This year the CPU vendors are fighting for the high end workstation market segment. AMD showed Thread Ripper 2 cpu with a whooping 32 cores on a single package. The details are scarce, but its is rumored to be around $1,500 price point. If this price is accurate this would really push Intel offering in this price range off the table. Intel showed a 28-core 5 ghz cpu, but this was essentially a marketing stunt to run a cpu at 5ghz requires phase change cooling and wouldn’t be reasonable for a consumer product. They said they’re going to release a 28-core chip but didn’t really have any details or a product to show.They didn’t show anything that could compete with threadripper 2 and at the 1.5K$ threadripper 2 rumored price point their current closest offering would be a core i9 extreme at 1.9k$ with 18 cores. AMD also announced they would start releasing 7nm node gpu, and server cpu chips. This is very exciting because a die shrink mean more performance for less heat and energy drain. You can read more about die shrinks here. Hopefully it eventually trickle down in to the consumer markets. While on the Intel side there was no news about 10nm, so we might have to wait a while for that. Also another thing that caught my eye is laptop makers are beginning once again to put AMD cpus into their line ups. Many of them come with Vega graphic compute units integrated into the ryzen cpus. The vega graphics bundle cpus are significantly better than Intel’s HD graphics offerings. This is significant for AMD because they had been largely left out of the laptop market for the past 10 years. Intel also release a limited edition i7 cpu to celebrate 8086 intel cpu. I don’t understand why they decided it would be a good idea. I just hope they don’t start trying to randomly put gold plated cpus and call them CPU loot boxes. Also Qualcomm announced their snapdragon 850 chip that is design for use with windows for ARM processors. This is interesting and i’ll talk more about ARM laptops later. That is the gist of CPU news from computex 2018.

In the GPU arena Nvidia has stayed mum, but AMD has announced their road map for their 7nm vega chips which should be shipping in the 2nd half of 2018.

Asus show some very interesting and unique products. They announced their ROG or Republic of Gamers branded phone which is a binned snapdragon 845 phone. The phone has a extensive array of accessories including a fan that will attach to the phone in landscape mode and cool the device, a device that docks with the phone that has a battery and second screen that can be used as a touch controller. Also a laptop that has a second screen instead of a keyboard, and a laptop that has a second small touch screen instead of a trackpad.

[gallery ids="159,160,161,162"]

This is the main news from computex 2018 there are some interesting this from other companies that i will probably discuss as they are release.