Bovoce: Computex 2023: news, hands-on, and more

After three years, Computex is finally back — in person, in all its glory. The biggest companies in the laptop and PC space, from Taiwan and elsewhere, will be gathered in Taipei this week to showcase products they’ll be releasing this summer and throughout the rest of 2023. We expect to see a whole bunch of refreshes to popular laptop lines, updated desktop components, and maybe even (dare we say it?) a CPU or two. Plus, software services and artificial intelligence were a major focus of CES earlier this year, and we certainly expect that trend to continue.

If you’re interested in following the latest laptop news but can’t make it out to Taiwan yourself, never fear.

We’ll be on the ground in Taipei all week, catching keynotes, interviewing the big players, and getting our hands on some of the most exciting gadgets that you’ll see in 2023. Come along for the ride.

A Mercedes computer?

If you’ve ever wished you could own a luxury car without paying luxury car money, you might consider, instead, an RGB gaming laptop. MSI has partnered with Mercedes to create the new Stealth 16 Mercedes-AMG Motorsport, and it looks like about what you’d get if you put a racecar into laptop form.

The new SMAM (that’s not its name, but it’s what I’m going to be calling it) features the Mercedes logo on the lid, an AMG rhombus pattern on the spacebar, and a power button that looks like an engine ignition. Oh, and it’s full of RGB. Because, of course. Obviously.

Laptop? Car? Lapcar? Lapcar.
Image: MSI
Here’s the new Prestige 16.
Image: MSI

MSI — a brand traditionally known for gaming hardware — has announced a bunch of laptops at Computex 2023, and there’s an interesting lack of gamery among them. Instead, the company appears to be focusing hard on the premium lifestyle space with its mid-2023 offerings.

Notable among these releases is the new Commercial 14 series, a line of business laptops intended to compete with high-end enterprise PCs — the likes of the ThinkPad. I conclude this from the fact that MSI’s press release highlights its “tailor-made solutions to enterprises through a series of optional security measures, NFC (near-field communication) and built-in Smart Card Reader.” If that’s not a word-for-word ThinkPad pitch, I don’t know what is.

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Asus has a proprietary new GPU power connector.

As the Computex 2023 show gets rolling, WCCF Tech highlights this “Megalodon” Nvidia RTX 4070 GPU and motherboard combo. It ditches the troublesome power cables found on today’s massive GPUs for a new slot that sits next to the standard PCIe Gen 4.0 x16 connection and delivers up to 600W of power, similar to the MPX Module in Apple’s Mac Pro.

Asus plans to release this tech globally later this year, and said devices with it will cost slightly more than the regular SKUs.

ASUS GeForce RTX 40 concept with proprietary power slot.
Image: WCCF Tech
This is what a 144TB Nvidia GPU looks like.

Nvidia just announced its DGX GH200 at Computex. It’s got 256 of its new “Grace Hopper superchips” for an exaflop of AI performance — and contains 150 miles of optical fiber and over 2,000 fans. Google, Meta and Microsoft will be “evaluating” it, though not necessarily purchasing kits: they tend to build their own compute clouds, even if they contain loads of Nvidia GPUs.

Nvidia says it’s 2.2x faster than a last-gen DGX H100 cluster at GPT3 training, as one example.
Arm Cortex Immortalis 2023.

Say it with me: Arm doesn’t sell chips. But it does design CPU and GPU cores its licensees can optionally use. What’s new?

Cortex-X4 (big CPU): 15% more perf, 40% less power

Cortex-A720 and A520: 20% and 22% more efficient, respectively

Immortalis-G720 (the GPU): 15% more perf, 40% lighter on memory bandwidth

Last time, they only came together in the MediaTek Dimensity 9200, which arrived in the Vivo X90, X90 Pro and Oppo Find X6.
At Computex 2023 in Taipei, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang just gave the world a glimpse of what it might be like when gaming and AI collide — with a graphically breathtaking rendering of a cyberpunk ramen shop where you can actually talk to the proprietor.

Seriously, instead of clicking on dialogue options, it imagines you could hold down a button, just say something with your own voice, and get an answer from a video game character. Nvidia’s calling it a “peek at the future of games.”

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Image: Future Publishing via Getty Images

Computex, one of the biggest trade shows of the year for the laptop and PC space, begins in a couple of days. A number of companies will have big announcements, but the most anticipated event of the week is Nvidia’s keynote, which will open the show on Monday morning.

The keynote speaker will be Nvidia’s founder and CEO Jensen Huang, who — in case you missed it — added $7 billion to his net worth a few days ago following the company’s massive Q1 earnings report.

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Computex is almost here.

The Taipei International Information Technology Show opens in just five days, and we’ve already got announcements rolling in. Acer’s getting the ball rolling this morning with the launch of a refreshed Swift Edge 16 (it’s high-end, AMD-powered, ultralight, OLED workstation) and Predator Triton 16 (a QHD AAA gaming rig).

Expanded tools for SpatialLabs, its glasses-free 3D technology, are also in the works. Whether these will be enough to make people actually want glasses-free 3D laptops, of course, remains to be seen.

We’ll be on the ground in Taipei next week bringing you news from all the biggest Taiwanese laptop companies (and maybe some others too).

Just casually using the new Swift Edge 16, as you do.
Image: Asus