Computex 2021: All the big announcements from AMD, Nvidia and Intel

Here are all announcements from the three brands including Nvidia’s 3080 Ti to AMD’s new APUs and Intel's new Beast Canyon NUC Extreme kit.

Computex 2021: Intel, AMD and Nvidia had their keynotes rigth at the beginning of the month-long all-virtual event. (Express Photo)

Computex kicked off its 2021 edition yesterday on June 1. While the all-virtual event is expected to go on for the full month of June, big tech names like AMD, Intel and Nvidia had their keynotes right at the beginning of the event.

We have brought together announcements from all three brands including Nvidia’s 3080 Ti to AMD’s new APUs and Intel’s new Beast Canyon NUC Extreme kit. Let’s begin with Nvidia.

Nvidia

Nvidia’s biggest update at the event was the announcement of its new graphic cards, the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti. As Nvidia’s history of naming its graphic cards suggests, the new cards are slightly more powerful versions of the RTX 3080 and 3070. The 3080 Ti is basically an RTX 3090 with half the video memory and almost as many CUDA Tensor and RT cores. The RTX 3070 Ti comes with faster GDDR6X video memory.

The 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti will launch on June 10 for $599 and June 3 for $1,199 respectively. Several new games will now be supporting RTX features. Two major titles include Rainbow Six: Siege and Red Dead Redemption 2, both of which will also be able to get better performance with Nvidia’s DLSS tech.

The company also showed off Dying Light 1983 and Doom Eternal, which will also be receiving support for ray tracing and DLSS. RTX will also be soon coming to VR titles like No Man’s Sky, Wrench, and Into the Radius.

Nvidia also announced the DGX Superpod subscription platform where businesses can harness the power of Nvidia’s DGX 2 supercomputer at $90,000 per month. While that figure sounds hefty, it can be a good deal for businesses, considering the DGX 2 costs $399,000.

AMD

AMD announced two new Ryzen 5000 APUs, the Ryzen 7 5700G and the Ryzen 5 5600G. The updated chips come with RDNA 2 graphic cores and Zen 3 CPU cores. The APUs are powerful enough to deliver playable frame rates on AAA games without the need of a dedicated graphics card. The cards are set to launch on August 5, with the 5700G costing $395 and the 5600G costing $259.

AMD also announced the new RX 6000M mobile graphic cards, also based on the RDNA 2 graphics. The three cards, the RX 6800M, 6700M and 6600M bring technologies like the FidelityFX suite, including Super Resolution, Smart Access Memory, and AMD Infinity Cach. There is also SmartShift, which allows switching between Radeon graphics and a Ryzen processor to increase gaming performance.

The company also launched the FidelityFX Super Resolution, or FSR, the answer to Nvidia’s DLSS tech that brings upscaling with high frame rates. The technology, which is set to launch on June 22, supports four quality using which AMD is able to deliver higher frame rates with demanding features like ray tracing while keeping the image quality largely intact.

AMD also spoke about its upcoming plans including 3D V-Cache, a technology that stacks 64MB cache on top of the core die to deliver triple the amount of L3 cache. This translates to about a 15 per cent performance improvement while gaming at 1080p with a Ryzen 5900X. The new tech is expected to be a part of AMD’s upcoming processors which are expected to launch by the end of the year.

Intel

Intel focused a large part of its keynote on the pandemic and how the company is investing in the future of domestic semiconductor manufacturing. However, there were some announcements.

These include the Intel 5G 5000 chip that will allow 5G connectivity on Windows laptops. The first laptops with supporting Intel chips are expected to launch later this year. The M.2 5G card has support for worldwide carrier certification, allowing laptops with the chip to connect to the network anywhere. Acer, Asus and HP already have laptops in the works for this year and Intel says over 30 more machines featuring the chip will arrive through 2022.

Intel also announced its Sapphire rapids Xeon scalable platform which is set to launch next year. Then there were two new Tiger Lake-U chips which promise a significant boost in performance on thin and light laptops. These include the Core i7-1195G7 with 5GHz clock speeds across 4 cores and 8 threads and the i5-1155G7 with a clock speed of 4.5GHz across 4 cores and 8 threads.