Computex 2019 has begun: What's been announced and what's to come

What is Computex? Computex is designed with us computer geeks in mind. It’s a great time to see new laptop and desktop announcements, tons of new accessories, and usually at least a few announcements around VR and other cutting edge tech.

When is Computex? Computex officially starts Tuesday, May 28 and ends Saturday, June 1. Most of the big announcements have already started happening, though several more will occur over the new few days.

Where is Computex? Computex 2019 takes place in Taipei, Taiwan. The majority of the event occurs in the Nangang Exhibition Center but there are plenty of companies and vendors spread throughout the city — including the Grand Hyatt Hotel and around the Taipei 101 skyscraper.

Who will be at Computex from Android Authority? This year, Managing Editor Andrew Grush and Senior Producer David Imel are at the show. Both of us are avid PC nerds and excited to bring you all the biggest announcements from the show.

What’s been announced so far

AMD

At Computex 2019, AMD pulled out all the punches, announcing significant updates for both its Radeon and Ryzen products. Easily the biggest announcement was the announcement of the 7nm Ryzen 3000 series. The Ryzen 3000 series had a variety of different chip models across the Ryzen 5, 7, and 9 families. The most exciting of these is easily the Ryzen 9 3900x, the first mainstream 12-core processor. Even more impressive this high-end chip is aggressively priced at $499.

In terms of graphics, the Radeon 5700 was introduced as the first chip to use the new Navi architecture. It’s also the first GPU to support PCIe Gen 4 and is effectively a direct competitor to the NVIDIA RTX 2070.

To learn more about AMD’s announcements head here.

Qualcomm

Qualcomm announced its 8cx laptop processor in December of 2018. At Computex 2019, we got our first look at PCs running the new chipset. Qualcomm has partnered with PCMark and 3DMark to produce ARM 64-native benchmarking apps for the platform and pitted the chip against Intel’s most comparable laptop CPU, the i5 8250U. With a TDP of seven watts, the Qualcomm 8cx has about double the battery life performance. The real surprise is that in a standard application benchmark test, the 8cx was neck-and-neck with Intel’s offering and actually beat Intel in graphics performance.

The real takeaway is that Qualcomm might finally be ready to deliver a reasonable laptop experience, something it didn’t quite do right out the gate. To learn more about Qualcomm’s benchmark results, head here.

Nvidia

Those hoping for big announcements from NVIDIA might be a little disappointed. Instead of introducing big hardware news, the company instead introduced its new NVIDIA RTX Studio certification program. This program sets specific standards for laptops designed with creatives in mind.

The new program sets standards on laptops, ensuring that they can handle the intense load creatives often throw at them. The spec requirements for these machines are as follows:

• NVIDIA RTX 206o or higher, or NVIDIA RTX Quadro 5000
• Intel Core i7 H-series CPU or higher
• 16GB of RAM or higher
• 512GB SSD or higher
• 1080p or 4K display

While the program is a little cool, we certainly would have liked to see a few more surprise announcements too. Maybe at E3?

You can learn more about the NVIDIA RTX Studio program here.

Asus

ASUS unveiled a slew of new devices at Computex 2019. These include new laptops that sport two displays, a few special edition products as part of the company’s 30th anniversary, and even a portable display for gamers.

The most significant announcement was the new ASUS Zenbook Duo and Pro Duo series which takes the company’s Screenpad technology and give it a sizable upgrade — literally. While the standard Screenpad fits into a trackpad’s traditional center position, the new Plus variant actually goes directly under the main display. The idea is that this screen now functions as a second screen for running additional applications and much more.

To learn more about the Zenbook Duo and Pro Duo check out our hands-on. For the rest of ASUS’ announcements, head here. 

What’s still to come

Intel

With AMD and Qualcomm both delivering some pretty big hits, Intel needs to really wow us. More than likely, Intel will show us its 10-nanometer Ice Lake chips which seem to have been delayed quite a bit. Aside from this, we expect at least a few small surprises: If we’re lucky, Intel will unveil more about its long-hinted GPU designed to take on NVIDIA and AMD.

MSI, Gigabyte, Dell, and HP

We’re sorry to say that HP isn’t officially at Computex 2019 this year. Of course, that doesn’t mean it won’t announce anything. It’s not unheard of for PC vendors to make announcements in conjunction with Computex even if they aren’t officially on the ground — as we saw with Razer.

As for Gigabyte and MSI, we know they are here and that they will likely have some cool announcements. That’s about all we know. Dell is also very much present and is likely to show off an XPS laptop running Ice Lake chips, alongside at least a few other hot announcements.

Any wild cards?

In the past we’ve seen VR and other things shown off at Computex, so it’s possible there will something along those lines here. We also know that 5G is a theme at Computex, so we expect at least a few smaller hardware announcements around that front.