PCWorld July 2018

AMD just did Intel one better at Computex. On the Tuesday of the show, Intel wowed the Taipei crowds with a 28-core Core chip (see page 11), which the company promised by the end of the year. One day after, on Wednesday, AMD announced Threadripper 2—and at 32 cores and 64 threads, it will easily top what Intel promised. AMD’s Threadripper 2 announcement was the highlight of the company’s press conference, which didn’t have much to offer in the way of new announcements in graphics. AMD did say that PowerColor’s tiny Vega 56 Nano for mini-ITX systems is now shipping. The company also showed off a 7nm derivative of its Radeon Vega GPU for workstations, advising users to “stay tuned” for 7nm consumer GPUs. Finally, the company showed off a 7nm…

Intel’s demonstration of a massive, 28-core PC chip capped off a busy Computex keynote on June 5 in Taipei, complete with a special record-breaking Anniversary Edition 8086K processor, the formal announcements of the Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake processor families, one-watt panels designed to drastically improve laptop battery life, and more. “More” included a look at mobile PCs from Asus and Lenovo with not one but two screens, of which PCWorld was allowed an exclusive sneak peek. It’s all great news for a PC industry that’s worked hard to climb back from declining sales. “The PC industry has been improving, which is great, and a large part of that is due to the innovation we’ve been driving with our PC partners,” said Gregory Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of the…

The gamers hoping, wishing, and praying for a new generation of GeForce cards to arrive at Computex got some bad news from the company’s CEO during a press briefing at the trade show: The hardware won’t show up for a “long time.” When reporters asked when the new GeForce GPUs would launch, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang responded, “It’s a long time from now.” Huang had just finished announcing Nvidia’s Jetson Xavier, which Huang said is the first computer designed specifically for robotics. Powered by six processors—including a Volta Tensor core GPU, eight ARM64 cores, and deep learning accelerators and image processors—Xavier is the kind of computer that could be used to build a robot to hand you a wrench in the lab, like Tony Stark’s Jarvis. Most of Nvidia’s press conference focused on…

Project Precog is a concept PC formed of two shimmering sheets of glass. Asus showed it to us on June 5 at Computex in Taipei, and it’s an intriguing vision of future PCs. And it’s a vision that appears to have legs: Marcel Campos, senior director of PC and phone marketing for Asus, said the company hopes to ship Project Precog in 2019. Until then, we’ll have to wonder what it will cost and what its exact features will be. DUAL DISPLAYS ARE HOT (AGAIN) Precog taps into what could be a resurgence of the two-screen design trend that briefly took hold with initiatives like Project Taichi, a dual-screen device Asus showed at Computex in 2012. Precog is much larger, though, and looks more like a traditional convertible laptop that can rotate from…

SSDs are about to get a whole lot bigger and a whole lot cheaper. Intel and Micron recently announced the delivery of the industry’s first Quad-Level Cell NAND dies, which will offer a third more space than previous technology. QLC technology stores four bits per cell on a NAND cell, which is a significant increase over today’s common TLC (Triple-Level Cell) NAND. Why this matters: As users hunger for ever more storage capacity, SSD makers have labored to add additional layers to meet those demands. QLC will give the title of densest flash to Micron and Intel with a single die capable of holding 1 terabit of information, the companies said. MORE STORAGE SSD capacity has grown gradually. The first SSDs used Single-Level Cell and stored a single bit per cell. That moved…

HP’s Mindframe headset will feature active cooling to keep your ears from sweating through gaming sessions. Repeat: This new HP headphone has active cooling. For your ears. The Mindframe is just the most innovative of a host of gaming accessories HP announced in late May. The company also introduced its Sequencer keyboard with optical mechanical switches, and the Reactor mouse with an aluminum cable designed to stay flat. The Reactor mouse will cost $79, while the Sequencer keyboard will set you back $179. Both should be available in June. HP says the Mindframe features thermoelectric coolers (TEC) integrated into the ear cups. TECs work by using an electrical charge to create a Peltier effect, which can radiate or absorb heat. TECs have been used for many years to cool computers and cute little…