Best of Computex 2015: Intel Thunderbolt 3, Nvidia GTX 980Ti, Asus ZenPad series and more

Computex 2015 got over on June 6 officially, although all the major announcements were already done by June 4 and the remaining days were just for showing off the latest in technology. Unlike the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas or the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Computex in Taipei has components and peripherals as its main focus. Of course, over the years mobility is making huge strides onto the show floors, but that is expected as not only is it a global trend, but the Taiwan computer industry is also moving its focus in that direction.

Five years back, Computex would be the show where components majors such as Intel, AMD, Nvidia and Taiwanese giants such as Asus, Gigabyte, Acer and so on announced their products which would soon be seen inside new rigs or as part of the peripherals belonging to the said rigs. This year among other things, the focus was mainly on mobility, with wearable technology and Internet of Things (IoT) getting a major push.

With many major technology companies having their own technology conferences and many more deciding to wait for the events such as IFA, CES and MWC, the volume of new announcements at Computex has certainly come down over the years. But one does comes across a lot of unheard-of brands, those which only sell products in Taiwan, China and other far-eastern markets. At times, some of their products really take you by surprise, at times you are left wondering - how can these companies sell exact replicas of famous products? But on the show floor, everything goes.

While it would take ages to list out all the major products that were launched at Computex, we have compiled a list of some of the best products and the best announcements we saw at Computex 2015. Of course, this will be a subjective list and some of you may think that it isn’t complete. Feel free to tell us what you think we should have also included. So here we go.

Asus ZenPad series

Taiwanese giant Asus always has a major keynote address at Computex. This year at its Zensation event , we saw Asus release a new line up of tablets, called the Asus ZenPad series. the four categories of tablets namely, the ZenPad 7, ZenPad 8.0, ZenPad S 8.0 and ZenPad 10 will come in multiple SKUs depending on the RAM and storage capacity you choose.

While the ZenPad 7, ZenPad 8 and ZenPad 10 feature a 1280 x 800 pixel display and houses the Intel Atom x3 processor, the ZenPad S 8.0 features a 2048 x 1536 pixel display and runs on the Intel Atom Z3580 (Moorefield) processor paired with 4GB of RAM. These tablets will come in a range of colours, will sport Android 5.0 Lollipop with the Asus ZenUI skin on top. Asus will also offer optional keyboard for the ZenPad 10, optional pressure sensitive styluses for ZenPad 8 and ZenPad 10 and optional Audio Cover providing a 5.1channel sound along with ZenPad 7 and ZenPad 8.

Intel RealSense 3D camera going mainstream

Intel had its keynote on June 2 and it saw a lot of announcements on the consumer electronics as well as on the Internet of Things front. But even before the keynote had begun, we had like an opening ceremony where a violinist, a guitarist and beat box artist were performing live on stage. Superimposed on these artists on the big screen, were visuals which were interacting with the intensity of the music. These visuals were coming from three tablets whose on-board cameras were shooting the performance, and each tablet was also recording the visual element based on the music.

The Intel RealSense 3D camera was first shown off at the Intel 2013 keynote address. Back then, the module had to be attached as a separate webcam to your computer. It was just a prototype and only one design was shown off inside a product which never really made it to the mainstream market.

Fast forward to 2015 and the RealSense 3D camera module will now be integrated into a lot of top end gaming as well as performance laptops. Intel even showcased a few 6-inch smartphones with the RealSense 3D camera module. Apart from the design wins which have a lot of laptops and all-in-ones from mainstream companies such as Dell, Toshiba, Lenovo and so on, Intel RealSense specific apps eco-system has also grown over the years. You can now use apps for live 3D face modelling, object scanning, 3D space mapping and many more industry specific needs.

Intel Broadwell socketed processors with Iris Pro graphics

Intel announced its latest 5th generation core processors with improved performance and graphics at Computex. At the Intel keynote, Kirk Skaugen also announced that 6th generation Intel core processors would making their appearance by the end of the year

Considering the 5th gen Broadwell processors were announced earlier this year; this latest upgrade, which includes 10 new desktop and mobile parts, (in addition to 5 Xeon processors) brings improved speed and graphics to the table. Apart from this, for the first time we will be seeing Iris Pro level graphics within an LGA form factor for the desktop CPU. This was announced back at the Game Developers Conference. This is unlike the BGA or non-socketed R-series Haswell processors, having the Iris Pro graphics, where the processor came soldered onto the board.

Intel Thunderbolt 3 on USB Type-C connector

The Thunderbolt 3, codenamed Alpine ridge, was announced at Computex will now support USB Type C connector, thereby hopefully making it accessible to more users than previous generation Thunderbolt machines. It will not require any proprietary connectors so to speak, which were seen in the previous generations.

Thunderbolt 3 offers a theoretical throughput of 40 Gbps, which is the fastest data transfer speed offered by a connected peripheral and this is twice as fast as Thunderbolt two, almost four times faster than USB 3.1 standard which maxes out at 10 Gbps.

It will also support two 4K displays at 60Hz and a single 5K display at 60Hz. Since the USB 3.1 controller is directly integrated on-platform, the Thunderbolt cable will also be able to charge the device.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 980Ti

Although announced just before Computex, the Nvidia GTX 980Ti is the latest high end graphics solution slotted between the GTX 980 and the GTX TITAN X. Housing 2816 CUDA cores and 6GB of GDDR5 RAM, the GTX 980Ti is clocked at 1000MHz with a boost clock of 1075MHz. Nvidia partners released a lot of cards featuring the GTX 980Ti.

The Nvidia show floor at Computex was filled with GTX 980Ti sporting machines, many of which were also running Oculus Virtual Reality demos. In case you missed it, here is our photo story on the Nvidia booths.  Clearly, the booths with the most serpentine queues were the Oculus VR demo and the VR gaming booths. Nvidia also announced the GameWorks VR software development kit for VR headset and game developers to come out with interesting gaming experiences. The Oculus VR demo room for instance had an Unreal game demo running.

Nvidia G-Sync on Gaming Laptops

On the Nvidia show floor, apart from booths having 4K enabled gaming machines powered by the GTX 980Ti and the Oculus VR demo zones, there were a lot of 4K gaming laptops with one feature that was so far only seen on monitors. Nvidia G-Sync, which aims at providing a smooth tear-free gaming experience, was announced for gaming notebook displays. G-Sync works by refreshing the monitor refresh rates with the frame rate coming out of GeForce GPUs. Generally, while gaming you either have to set the monitor refresh rate to 60Hz, else suffer from issues such as screen tearing because of variable frame rates. Nvidia G-Sync housing laptops will come with a special G-Sync panel.  While G-Sync has so far only been available in a full screen mode, Nvidia announced support for Windowed mode operation in a future driver update. Some of the G-Sync supporting notebooks on display were the Gigabyte Aorus X7 Pro-Sync, MSI GT72, Asus G751 and so on.

Dell XPS 15

This was easily one of the best looking laptops around, thanks to the bezel-free display called the Infinity Display. First announced with the Dell XPS 13 at CES, the Infinity Display seen on the 15-incher looked gorgeous. The Dell XPS 15 was on display as part of Microsoft Forum and the Dell representatives would not share the detailed specifications of the model. It will most likely be released only in the later half this year. It is rumoured to be sporting the latest 5th generation Intel Core series processors which were announced at Computex. The display resolution is also expected to be 3200 x 1800 pixels. The operating system of choice will be Microsoft Windows 10. We will have to wait for details to come out regarding this stunner.

Mediatek Helio P10 chips

Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek announced its Helio P10 chipset. The Helio P10 features a 2GHz true octa-core 64-bit Cortex-A53 CPU and a 700MHz dual-core 64-bit Mali-T860 GPU. It is said to be the first chip in the new Helio P family and comes with support for up to 21MP cameras and a new TrueBright image processing engine. It is also the first product to use TSMC’s 28nm HPC+ process, which allows for reduced processor power consumption.

Some of the new features available in the P series include several of MediaTek’s technologies, such as WorldMode LTE Cat-6, supporting 2×20 carrier aggregation with 300/50Mbps data speed; MediaTek’s task scheduling algorithm, CorePilot and MediaTek’s Visual Processing Application, the non-contact Heart Rate Monitoring, which uses a smartphone’s video camera to take a heart rate reading and is comparatively as accurate as pulse oximeters or portable ECG monitoring devices.

Acer Predator 8

Tablets have kind of stuck in a rut when it comes to design. Most companies are concentrating on coming out with thinner and lighter tablets. But at Computex, we got to see a tablet which had a seriously impressive design. The Acer Predator 8 comes with an Intel Atom x7 processor (code named Cherry Trail) and has four front-firing speakers. Aimed at gamers, the Predator 8 runs on Android operating system and comes in a gray and red colour scheme. It is expected to launch in September.

AMD Carrizo APUs 

AMD launched its 6th generation Accelerated Processing Units or APUs at Computex codenamed Carrizo. These APUs are addressed at the $400 to $700 laptop market and according to AMD, they strike a right balance at providing good gaming performance while at the same time ensuring longer battery life. AMD has partnered with Acer, Asus, HP, Toshiba and Lenovo for laptop designs featuring Carrizo APUs. The basic architecture of the Carrizo APUs consists of four Excavator CPU cores along with eight new Graphics Core Next (GCN) cores. According to AMD, even though Carrizo is based on the same 28nm process as the Kaveri series of APUs, it occupies 23 per cent less die area and uses 40 per cent less power. It will also incorporate HEVC H.265 hardware decoding, which should help compress high resolution videos to smaller sizes without affecting video quality. Since it is a hardware based decoding, the HEVC H.265 will free the CPU from decoding tasks.

Disclaimer: This correspondent was invited for Computex by Intel. Travel and accommodation expenses were borne by Intel.