Computex

The Verge’s Monica Chin sat in it at Computex, and says the Orb X is ideal if you love gaming and hate other people. It’s covered in the requisite RGB lights, while a reclining chair, 34-inch curved gaming monitor and “freaking dope” sound system rounds it out.

I haven’t asked, but I’m guessing she means that sci-fi villain. Would try.

This is the Asus ROG Rapture GT-BE98 on display at Computex, and it’s the world’s first quad-band Wi-Fi 7 gaming router, boosting speeds of up to 25,000Mbps. It is also the largest and scariest-looking router I have ever seen in my life.

(Asus representatives confirmed to me that there is no technical reason it needs to look like a giant RGB spider. That was just a design choice.)

Or at least, it’s trying to. The company is working on a program called AI Artist, which it hopes to preload onto future MSI devices. You select a style (manga and realism are currently available), you select a size, and you type what you want to be drawn into a text box. Watch the wheel spin for a while, and AI Artist spits out an image.

I’m calling it now: We’re going to see more of this. It’s clear from walking around Computex 2023 that AI, and what it can do for consumers, is at the center of the conversation.

Acer has been making glasses-free 3D laptop displays for a few years now, but has apparently decided that those displays weren’t wide enough. I just tried out SpatialLabs Panoramic View, which mushes three 15-inch 3D displays together to make one giant 3D image.

Standing in the middle of this is a very cool and trippy experience (provided that you don’t move away from the center — that throws it all off). I actually flinched as a virtual boulder came barreling my way, and the entire Computex show floor laughed at me. Look, I promise you that it seemed very real at the time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).