MADE IN TAIWAN Hottest products from Computex 2019
Held in Taipei, Computex occupies a unique place in the technology trade show calendar. While not as big as IFA, MWC or CES, it’s now seen as an excellent launchpad for key technologies – and this year we’ve seen a bumper crop, with big announcements from AMD and Intel. Tim Danton shares the news and releases that matter
12 5G IS STILL COMING
During Computex – but purely by an accident of timing – we saw the first use of 5G in Britain, with the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones covering the launch of the UK’s first 5G network from Covent Garden live on BBC Breakfast. He even used EE’s 5G network to beam his segment back to New Broadcasting House. While 5G didn’t grab the headlines at this year’s show, the tech was still in the background like an eager school child fidgeting in its chair saying “me, me!” Qualcomm, for instance, announced the “world’s first” 5G PC – powered, naturally, by Qualcomm silicon.
The idea is an always-on, alwaysconnected PC, much like phones and tablets. All that said, it could be a while before “Project Limitless” comes to fruition, with the machine still a prototype.
11 PROJECT ATHENA COMES INTO FOCUS
One of the reasons that Intel so dominates premium laptop sales is that it’s the one that defines what a premium laptop means. We saw it with Ultrabooks, we saw it with Centrino; and now the friendly silicon giant wants to define the next wave of “Project Athena” laptops.
There are six parts to the target specification that Intel laid out on stage in its Computex keynote. First, the laptop should be “ready to go before you are”. That means a wake from sleep time of less than one second, and a biometric login of either fingerprint or facial recognition.
Second, it must be fast and responsive. Not just when plugged in, but on battery power, too. Intel says that means Core i5 or Core i7 processors and at least a 256GB NVMe SSD (so no slower SATA 3 drives). Very kindly, it suggest that its own SSD solution – Optane, with 32GB of superfast memory as cache – is a mere option.
An Athena laptop must also include “adaptive intelligence”, which translates into hardware support for the Windows WinML machine learning API and Intel’s own OpenVINO software. If that seems a bit fuzzy, the “worry-free battery life” is clearly defined: at least nine hours of real-world performance.
Naturally, Intel is pushing Thunderbolt 3 and Wi-Fi 6 for connectivity, and it wants all of this packed into an “ultra slim” form factor – whether a 2-in-1 design or clamshell. You should also expect narrow bezel designs,
Full HD or better touchscreen displays and pen support.
The only areas that mark a shift away from current premium laptops are the fast wake-from-sleep times – tablets still have the jump on laptops here – and the adaptive intelligence aspect. So nothing too groundshaking. Little wonder, then, that Intel could claim support from 100 companies (Google among them, Apple notably absent) with the promise of availability by “holiday 2019”.
10 COOL THINGS ARE COMING TO OFFICE 365
Offering one of the few places to sit comfortably on the show floor, it’s little wonder that Microsoft’s mini conference area saw a regular flow of visitors. I stopped to listen to a demo of upcoming “AI” features for Office and Teams, and – while excited may be too strong a word – was interested to see one feature in particular.
It’s for PowerPoint and uses AI to suggest layouts based on the content of your slides. So you might drop an image of plants into your presentation and PowerPoint will provide a handful of suggested designs to take advantage. And if you put bullet points of spring, summer, autumn and winter, it will fish out appropriate graphics to turn that into a far more attractive list.
Microsoft promises other AI features for Word and Excel too, along with tight integration to Teams. Exciting – sorry, interesting – times ahead.
9 CASE MAKERS ARE INSANE
One of the joys of visiting Computex is walking around the ground floor hall of Nangang Exhibition Center and admiring a cascade of colour. You are greeted by a wall of RGB fans the moment you walk in, and things don’t let up from there.
Here, we’ll let the pictures do the talking (company names in brackets)…
8 PEOPLE BUILD WEIRD MODS
Rather than simply display motherboards, some manufacturers preferred to show what enterprising people can do with their offerings – and that means mods. Three of the best were on Zadak’s stand, including the superb The Time Traveler ( right). My eye was also taken by Enermax’s ProjectCyberbike ( above), where the company had mounted an RGB-lit computer inside the frame of a bike. And yes, it is as weird as it sounds.
7 AI AND IoT AIN’T GOING AWAY
You’re probably sick of the terms AI and IoT, but that doesn’t stop the likes of Intel and Microsoft pontificating about them. Much of Microsoft’s keynote consisted of the company talking about its investment in IoT on Azure and how businesses needed to embrace the cloud. Here’s a sample sentence from Nick Parker, Microsoft corporate vice president of consumer and device sales, in the accompanying blog: “… intelligent edge ecosystem partners can fuel business transformation by working together to build edge to cloud IoT solutions”.
Beneath such sickly sentences there is genuine meaning. A business network used to mean a bunch of beige PCs connected to a wired network; today’s business network could hardly be more different. Surely there are new opportunities for forwardthinking businesses if they embrace them. Here’s Nick again: “The breadth of innovative intelligent edge devices and solutions our partners, across the PC and IoT ecosystems, have delivered in the last year is incredible, and we’re just getting started!”
YOU SHOULD ALWAYS 6 BOOK ACER’S CEO FOR KEYNOTES
You can watch the whole of AMD’s keynote by visiting pcpro.link/299acer, but I suggest you fast forward to around 49 minutes when Jerry Kao, Acer co-CEO, goes off-script and delivers a couple of, let’s say contentious, statements. “You’re unique,” he tells a nervous looking Dr Lisa Su. He went on to explain that AMD is in a unique position because it makes highperforming CPU and GPU silicon, while accusing both Intel and Nvidia (but not by name) of trying to make both but “they failed”. Ouch.
5 THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS TOO MUCH RGB
I’m not a huge fan of RGB but if you’re going to do it, don’t hold back. That’s the view of Computex exhibitors, too, with some magnificent specimens on show. I’m not just talking fans, but whole systems lit up in such an extraordinary way that makes Christmas trees feel underdressed.
SeaSonic won my personal award for “best RGB of show”, with this beast of a machine. No area escaped from its glitzy attention, and I loved the mix of tubular brushed metal cooling pipes and neon-like RGB colouring. Even in a sea of RGB, it really stood out.
4 CREATORS ARE ON-TREND
Big technology companies are always keen to spot a trend, and this year’s focus is on the creators. The question is: are you one?
Sometimes it feels as if the definition is loose enough to fit anyone, but here it appears to cover keen amateurs, semi-pros and full professionals who “create” on their computers. That could be publishing videos to YouTube, 3D modelling, photography, music, game design – you name it.
Nvidia in particular had its eyes on creators, using Computex to launch its RTX Studio scheme. There’s no doubt that the company has taken inspiration from Intel, because at its heart this is a badge. The general idea is that if you, a “creator”, see a laptop with an Nvidia RTX Studio badge on it then you can be confident it will work with demanding creative applications such as Adobe Premiere Pro, Maya, Autodesk Arnold and Davinci Resolve.
While certification for such applications is nothing new, it’s previously been restricted to workstation-level specifications such as Quadro graphics. Now, the idea is that someone can buy a laptop with consumer-level graphics such as an RTX 2060 and still be confident the demanding apps will take advantage of the technology inside. To be certain, Nvidia has committed to testing each submitted laptop in around 200 different applications. At launch, it had seven different signed-up partners (Apple and Lenovo were notably absent) and 17 duly badged laptops.
3 TWO SCREENS ARE BETTER THAN ONE
While AMD was lording it over the world’s press with its numerous desktop announcements at Computex ( see
opposite), Intel revealed a pair of curious laptop concepts that included two very different dual-screen setups. The first, codenamed Honeycomb Glacier and pictured below right, has echoes of the Asus ZenBook Pro Duo ( see p38). The main difference is that Intel’s design lifts up so that both screens are at an angle, with the middle screen propped up by a hefty but retractable stand. In truth, it looks plain bizarre.
I was more taken by the company’s Twin Rivers concept. This “laptop” consisted of two 13.3in screens attached
together in a folio-like design, so was more akin to a giant electronic book than a laptop. Why? Imagine you’re reading a digital edition of PC Pro: you would flick the pages from left to right as you read. Then, inspired no doubt by an article in said magazine, you decide to start work on a project. You put the laptop into a more conventional clamshell position and either start typing on a virtual keyboard or reach for the removable, physical keyboard; lay this across the top of the second screen and a touchpad miraculously appears below. You now have what looks very much like a normal laptop setup and can start working. You might also decide to remove the keyboard entirely and use the machine as a twoscreen array, whether arranged vertically or horizontally. Perhaps to extend an Excel spreadsheet across both screens, perhaps to view TV on one and have a feed of supplementary information on the other. It’s an interesting idea, and hammers home one of Computex’s themes that two screens are better than one, but it’s still hard to imagine a future where the traditional clamshell laptop design doesn’t reign supreme.
2 INTEL IS STILL KING OF MOBILE
Quite aside from its Project Athena talk ( see p35) and dual-screen prototypes, Intel used Computex to hammer home its mobile advantage over AMD by releasing more tantalising details about its first full family of 10nm processors. The products formerly known as Ice Lake are now called 1oth Gen Intel Core chips, and while we don’t have a release date (“coming soon”, says Intel; thanks so much) or exact models, we do know some crucial details.
First, along with the not-at-all coincidental requirement of Thunderbolt 3 and Wi-Fi 6 as mentioned with Project Athena, some 10th Gen chips will include Iris Plus graphics. This is worth choosing over the basic Intel UHD Graphics because it’s roughly twice as fast. For example, Intel demoed Ice Lake laptops playing demanding games such as Counter Strike: Global
Offensive at almost 90fps – a far cry, if you’ll
excuse the pun, from the typical 45fps of UHD 620 Graphics.
You should also see playable frame rates from Fortnite (at Low settings) and Dirt Rally 2 (again, Low), so despite the thoughts of Acer CEOs – see point 7 – Intel has produced a capable CPU/GPU package for laptops. Iris Pro also delivers hardware acceleration for the likes of Adobe Premiere, as well as support for HDR and Dolby Vision.
What else do we know? Chiefly, that Ice Lake CPUs will have up to four cores (eight threads) and go up to 4.1GHz, with support for up to 64GB of DDR4-3200 memory. However, we must still wait for exact model specifications, other than the alreadyannounced Core i3 chip inside the excellent Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 on p35.
1 AMD WINS COMPUTEX
AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su couldn’t keep a smile from appearing on her face throughout her 90-minute keynote – and little wonder. AMD, so often the bridesmaid to Intel at big industry events, delivered a series of body blows to the once indomitable silicon giant.
Number one: five new 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen desktop chips, with the star of the show being the Ryzen 3900X ( see p12 for
news of its sister chip, the 3950X). We can’t know for sure until we test it ourselves, but judging from the demos – and the specifications – it’s set to beat the Intel Core i9-9900X for speed and utterly demolish it for value. We expect it to come in at around £500, so less than half the price of its rival.
While the 3rd Gen Ryzen processors will be backwards compatible with older AM4 motherboards, AMD also announced a new chipset to take advantage of the chip’s extra talents. Buy a board with the AMD X570 chipset and you’ll reap the reward of PCIe 4, doubling the bandwidth for graphics cards, NVMe SSD drives and networking devices. While AMD was proud to announce over 50 motherboard models with the X570, don’t expect this new technology to come cheap. If Dr Su was hoping for as big a cheer when she unveiled RNDA, “the next foundational architecture designed to drive the future of PC gaming, console and clouds for years to come,” then she was to be disappointed. Reaction in the room was much more muted, despite the promise of a 25% boost in performance-per-clock over its predecessor. A week later, at gaming expo E3 in Los Angeles, AMD went a step further and announced the first two cards based on RDNA: the RX 5700 XT and RX 5700, pitched against Nvidia’s RTX 2070 and RTX 2060 respectively. The demos looked convincing, and note they’re the first graphics cards to support PCIe 4, but with no ray tracing support and a higher street price than their Nvidia equivalents, it looks like an uphill battle for AMD here. But while AMD didn’t win every battle, it did win the Computex war. In stark contrast to Intel, it can talk of 7nm everywhere. If you want to buy a fast desktop PC in the next year or two, AMD should be top of your thoughts.