Computex 2019: Everything there is to know

Next week the tech world will converge in San Francisco for WWDC, Apple's conference on all things iOS and Mac. But for the past week in Taipei, Taiwan for Computex, we've gotten a glimpse into the future of Windows PCs and laptops.

The big, long-term takeaway is that single-screen laptops are possibly a thing of the past -- or dual-screen laptops are going to be the tech industry's next spectacular gimmick. Either way, there will be many multiple-screen devices in our future.

Asus doubles down on dual displays

Asus unveiled the ZenBook Pro 15 at last year's show. Its star feature was the ScreenPad, a phone-sized second screen that functioned as the laptop's trackpad. One year later, Asus' ZenBook Pro Duo became Computex 2019's star product.
The chip business is also, ahem, heating up. AMD had a buzz-creating showing at Computex, while Intel introduced its 10th-generation Ice Lake CPUs, among other big announcements. Qualcomm, meanwhile, promises 5G laptops in the not-too-distant future, and Nvidia is expanding its graphics card line to better accomodate creatives.

Processor proselytism

One of Computex's biggest stories wasn't about devices, but the parts that power them. 

Intel and Nvidia have both dominated the CPU and GPU markets, respectively, for the past decade. Since 2015, Intel has held roughly 80 percent of the processor market against its main rival, AMD. Meanwhile, Nvidia has fluctuated from 60 to 80% over its main rival, AMD.

But AMD, whose CPU marketshare has jumped 3% in the last year, came out guns blazing atComputex. It officially announced its Navi range of Radeon GPUs, which will power the Sony PlayStation 5, but its main focus was on competing with Intel. 

Notably, AMD stock rose 10% after the announcement.

But Intel had a strong showing at Computex, too. Apart from the dazzling concepts shown above, Intel's two main announcements were its 10th-gen Ice Lake CPUs and Project Athena.

While AMD focused on benchmark comparisons, Intel promised tangible quality-of-life improvements. Laptops with its Ice Lake chips will be even thinner than already lithe devices like the Dell XPS and HP Envy and their battery life will be improved, too. I was personally most impressed by Ice Lake's gaming chops: Intel showed an Ice Lake-powered laptop running Destiny 2 on integrated graphics alone, without any discrete GPU.

Project Athena, meanwhile, is a new class of laptop. To get the Athena stamp of approval, companies like Asus, Lenovo and Dell need to make laptops that hit certain criteria. These include the ability to wake up within a second, achieve 9 hours of "real-world battery life" and more. Project Athena laptops will hit the market by the end of the year, Intel says.

Qualcomm made a similar pitch. Just as its parts power the 5G phones from Samsung, LG and Nokia, the American company wants to fuel the 5G laptop revolution. It says we'll soon have laptops that are internet connected at all times and location aware -- in addition to the usual promises of svelter designs and longer battery lives.

Nvidia unveiled RTX Studio, which are laptops powered by its new Quadros RTX GPUs. These graphics cards have similar power to the new RTX GeForce cards (that is to say, a lot), but have much more memory. A high-end GeForce GPU will have 8GB of memory, for instance, while Quadro cards can double that. The average Joe won't need that boost, but for creatives who work with 3D rendering and high-resolution video editing (think 4K, 6K and 8K), it makes a huge difference.

And finally, UK-based Arm announced its Cortex-A77 chip, which it promises will make high-end Android phones 20% faster in 2020.

The laptops of Computex

The Asus ZenBook Pro Duo was the most attention-grabbing laptop at Computex, but it wasn't the only one worth your attention. 

Dell pushed meaningful updates to both its premium productivity laptop, the XPS, and its premium gaming laptop, the Alienware m. The XPS 15 gets OLED displays for the first time, as well as Intel's Ice Lake CPU, Nvidia's GTX 1650 and 64GB of RAM. The Alienware m15 and m17 laptops got significant facelifts, and the latter can now be configured with a 244Hz display.

Last but not least, Nvidia's RTX Studio parts are cool -- but mean nothing without companies making laptops for creatives. Razer and Acer have stepped up to the plate, with the former committing its Razer Pro 17 to the RTX Studio program and Acer updating its ConceptD with new Quadro parts.