THE HOTTEST TECH AND TRENDS OF COMPUTEX 2017

ASIA’S BIGGEST TECH SHOWCASE IS ALWAYS A HOTBED FOR BIG PC ANNOUNCEMENTS AND SNEAK PEEKS AT WHAT’S SOON TO COME. INTREPID REPORTERS BRAVED THE FLOOR TO HUNT DOWN THE NEXT BIG THINGS.

WHILE COMPUTEX 2017 wasn’t quite as flamboyant as last year’s VR-centric show — missing out on left-field product novelties like ASUS’s Zenbo and AMD’s massive Radeon 400 series GPU announcement — this year’s event still carried an unmistakable amount of momentum on certain themes. This force came largely from Nvidia’s new mobile GPUs, which manage to harness unprecedented levels of efficiency to pass on big weight, cooling and performance benefits to just about every tier of gaming laptop.

The other overwhelming theme was just how reinvigorated AMD is looking now. The American chip manufacturer pointed out the significant performance-per-dollar boosts its new Ryzen CPUs were achieving over Intel’s incumbent Core i7 range, and the company then went on to announce a supremely powered set of Ryzen 9 workstation CPUs and even took potshots at Nvidia by cleverly collaborating with Dell to show just how good value an AMD CPU/GPU combination can be in all-in-one powerhouses, like the new Inspiron 27 7000 (see right).

Other notable highlights included the launch of the first HDR-capable PC gaming monitors, some interesting reductions in laptop screen latency and the arrival of Nvidia’s Jetson TX2 and Isaac Initiative software — which are intended to make advanced AI more accessible and widespread — for what was, all-up, a pretty impressive Taipei display.