The first gaming event of 2019 already took place, and there was something to show off on it by the leading players in the industry, at least on the PC centric end of it. The CES 2018 was held in Las Vegas this past January 8th, and some exciting announcements came from hardware developers that offer a tease on what seems to be an interesting year ahead.
Intel, Nvidia, and AMD had something to show off. After reviewing their announcements, we are left wondering who among them will have the most significant impact during the year. The reports certainly seem to indicate that the never-ending war in improvement on existing products will continue as well as new developments that could prove to be very interesting.
Here is what we gathered for this special report:
Intel
Not many were expecting a lot out of Intel for this year, but the company managed to offer an onslaught of announcements related to PC parts and newly redesigned elements of their architecture. So far the most relevant announcements were a new mobile PC platform named “Ice Lake” that is aimed to accelerate Ai usage and elevate Gen-11 graphics to a whole new level. They also made more explicit statements over project Athena and a brand new line of Laptops built to capitalize all their current existing technology into a single package aimed at improving the performance of existing hardware
Intel also announced hybrid technology that marries 3D packages to new CPUs that can work with light designed hardware such as smaller motherboards. They also introduced new updates regarding the expansion of the 9th Generation of Intel processors to unlock even more powerful functions that can handle the new developments of third parties with ease by making desktops more functional and effective in their use of power. There was also a brief talk about expanding 5G technology with 10nm SoCs to make wireless signal even more powerful and extend the reach of it to unexpected corners on the world.
Their last big card was showing off the Xeon scalable processors, a brand new technology that is ready to back up Intel’s DL Boost and Dc persistent memory functions while improving AI learning inference. Not bad for being just seven days into the New Year!
Nvidia
It certainly feels like it was a big show for Nvidia too. The company finally launched a long-awaited product by announcing the price and release date of the RTX 2060, the powerful graphics card that makes the Turing architecture accessible to a large number of players with machines that require minimal adjustments to handle it. The main feature of the card is offering real-time ray tracing, something that was previously relegated to high-end desktops or custom built gaming laptops. The company also filled a good portion of the showroom with 40+ new models of laptops as well as monitors capable of handling the specs of the latest tech in smooth displays.
AMD
By all means, the company has owned this convention for the past two years with pretty big announcements at the beginning of the year. While their conference was a tad downplayed, they managed to get a few licks in by announcing the Ryzen 3. A new 7nm architecture meant to update the functionality of every existing AMD component being manufactured right now. The 3rd gen processor is certainly a small chip able to handle up to eight cores on its own. The company also announced that the Ryzen 3 is set to be the first processor in the world that can process the new PCIe 4.0 protocol that allows a faster performance and data transfers that can go up as far as 16 GB-transfers.
The Rest of the Show
Corsair offered a few updates on various peripheral devices. We managed to get a glimpse on a few lines of memory cards, keyboards, and streaming boxes. There was also a lot of chant about video games and big announcements about smartphones functionality on Samsung’s and Apple’s end. All in all, it was a terrific show, one that was certainly jam-packed if we consider the fact that it was made just seven days in 2019. It certainly feels good to have a glimpse in the future, but there is still more to come!