COMPUTEX 2017 TECH TRENDS
BENNETT RING took time out from motion sim VR to assess the rest of the show
With a sweaty crew of four Next Media employees just returning from the world’s largest PC hardware show, Computex 2017, we’ve now got a pretty good grasp on what to expect for the rest of the year, and a taste of the year to come. It was four days of non-stop tech, sweat and sore feet, but it was also one of the best shows in recent years, thanks to the recent release of AMD’s Ryzen, which certainly kicked one company into gear. Let’s take a look at the key things that blew our minds at this year’s show.
INTEL CORE-X CPU
Thank you to AMD for lighting a fire under Intel’s butt. You can read our full Core-X feature in this issue, but Intel’s response was definitely one of the huge themes of the show. Not only did they reveal their Core-X CPUs, nine or so in total, which are about half the price of their prior 10-core CPUs, they also unveiled the accompanying chipset, the X299. You can read much more about these in our exhaustive feature in this issue though. As a result, every motherboard manufacturer was desperate to show off their new X299 boards, though we think it’s overkill for mainstream gamers.
AMD’s reply was to rip out more threads in its CPUs, which they’ve just happened to call the Threadripper. This monstrosity is about the size of the palm of an adult hand, and features a rather insane 16 cores, with two threads per core. It too requires a new chipset, which AMD has rather sneakily called the X399 – hopefully consumers don’t confuse it with Intel’s new X299 chipset. While the X299 and Core-X products are readily available, consumers will have to wait a few more months for the Threadripper (Coolest. Name. Ever.) and accompanying motherboards. We were desperate on information about the Vega GPU architecture, but sadly were only informed that we’d here more about it at Siggraph. Damn you AMD, but still, we owe it to you for restarting the initiative in the CPU battles. Ryzen was everywhere to be seen, and we can expect it to also show up in the new Ryzen Mobile APU, which uses Zen cores from the Ryzen, and Vega Compute Units from the Vega GPU. It’s looking to be a killer product, and the likes of Dell, Lenovo and Acer were all there to show off their upcoming notebook prototypes.
MOTION RIGS
While VR was nowhere near as popular this year as last, two peripherals designed to work with it simply blew our minds. The first was MSI’s Vibrating VR chair; it’s basically a US$9k racing rig with motion simulation. This isn’t the first on the market, but to see a mainstream brand like MSI getting into it should see prices start to drop. But by far the most impressive was the Gigagyte Aorus 720 Motion Simulator. Unlike MSI’s product, which only has a small range of motion, the 720 can basically go fully vertical, sideways, and any other direction. The user has to be strapped in with the similar mounting
it needs extremely thick mounts to stop the thing ripping your floor apart
system seen on roller coasters, and it needs extremely thick mounts to stop the thing ripping your floor apart. At US$20k it’s not cheap, but when combined with a Rift and HOTAS makes for the ultimate flight simulator; far more affordable than doing it for real.
PVME SSDS
We can’t recall seeing a single SSD at the show that didn’t support the NVMe format for M.2 and U.2 drives, which will lead to an exponential speed boost when it comes to storage performance. Every motherboard also had support for this, and many motherboards now boast up to three M.2 slots. M.2 cooling is also a big deal now, with most motherboards featuring a small heatsink for M.2 drives to stop the issue of thermal throttling. We even saw a product that allows users to mount four M.2 drives onto a single PCIe x16 card, and run them in RAID 0 mode. Speak of RAID, Intel showed of its Virtual Raid on CPU, which promises to make it simpler to set up RAID configurations in much more flexible configurations. It’s an on-CPU technology, but you need to buy a special key to enable it.
RGB STILL HASN’T DIED
Ok, maybe we’re getting old and cynical, but we’re really not that impressed by cases that glow like a nuclear reactor. Yet it seems that every product now available on the market now comes with RGB lights. The major players like MSI and Gigabyte are trying to get all their gear to place nicely together, though there are some rivalries such as Corsair and Thermaltake where it seems very unlikely. This is why RGB lighting needs its own kind of standard for communicating to stop consumers ending up with products that don’t work together – here’s hoping.
GAMING CHAIRS ARE THE NEW HEADSET
A few years ago and it seemed that every peripheral maker and his proverbial dog was making headsets. Well, now they’re making gaming chairs. According to one marketing person I spoke to, this is because gaming chairs are one of the products where there’s still a healthy profit margin to be made. A few of them were actually decent, and most seem to sit around the $400 price point. However, after using a Herman Miller Aeron for six years, there’s no going back for me.
802.11AD
Yup, there’s another Wi-Fi standard on the way, and this time it’s designed for Ultra high speeds at ultra-close range. It uses the 60GHz spectrum instead of 5GHz or 2.4GHz as seen in today’s devices, and delivering a theoretical maximum of 7Gbps. There’s also a new wave of high-speed Ethernet on the way, with both 5Gbit/sec and 10Gbit/ sec showing up on motherboards, routers, and NAS devices.
So there you have it in a nutshell. The incredible hype around VR had definitely died off, though it was still present at most booths, just not promoted via huge signs and dozens of booth babes. The major news is the recommencement of the CPU wars, and that gaming chairs are apparently the hot new thing.
You can find all our Computex coverage in the PCPP Tech Special 2017, on sale now.