Ahead of the Computex PC electronics conference, AMD held its keynote to announce its highly anticipated Ryzen 3000 series processor. AMD led off the conference with its keynote, which was presented by the company’s CEO, Dr. Lisa Su.
Here’s everything you need to know about how to watch it.
The presentation was held the morning before Computex officially kicks off, at 10 a.m. Monday, May 27, in Taipei. Fortunately, you don’t have to be in Taiwan to watch as the entire presentation was livestreamed.
Here in the states, the keynote started at 7 p.m. PT on Sunday, May 26, or 10 p.m. ET.
The entire livestream is embedded above.
First and foremost, we expect AMD to fully unveil the company’s 3rd generation Ryzen CPUs, and the accompanying Radeon Navi graphics cards, which the company teased at CES 2019. While the benchmarks debuted at the time suggest that it will be a formidable contender to Intel’s powerhouse processors, the exact specs for the Ryzen 3000 series are hard to pin down.
The first reliable glimpse of the Ryzen 3000 line, and what kind of base specs it will offer, came shortly after AMD’s tease of the chip at CES 2019. At that point, the preview Ryzen 3000 model the company showed off, built according to their Zen 2 architecture and with 7nm manufacturing, demonstrated performance that was on par with Intel’s Core i9-9900K but with 30 percent less power consumption, and sporting PCIe 4.0 connectivity.
New leaks this week from Wccftech shed more light on the specs to expect from the 3rd generation desktop Ryzen line. So far, the 3000 series will feature at least two models, one with 12 cores and a lightning-fast 5.0 GHz clock speed without overclocking, and the other with 16 cores and 4.2 GHz.
A subsequent leak published by Wccftech also reveals some details on the new Radeon Navi GPUs that will eventually release with the Ryzen 3000 CPUs: The flagship Radeon Navi RX 3080 will bump the previous generation’s four shader engines to eight shader engines, each with 5 compute units.
Beyond these recently reported details, consumers have a lot less to go off of as to how the final launch portfolio for this year’s AMD CPUs will look. In March, speculations pointed to a 3rd generation lineup of at least five different models across a range of price points (from around $200 to almost $600) to offer more tiers, and thus more choice, to consumers than their 2nd generation predecessors. We also learned that the new CPUs would still conform to AMD’s favored AM4 socket, maintaining continuity and modularity with the 2000 series, and with the prospective 4000 series which the company has promised to build with AM4 sockets. Finally, rumors circulated about an ultra-high-end Threadripper line within the 3000 series due to be announced later in the year, after the base 3000 models hit the market.
A lot has changed on this front since March. To start the Threadripper variants of the Ryzen 3000 line initially slated for late 2019 appears to be in serious doubt, though its fate remains to be seen. It is also likely that the 3rd generation will include a wide array of options, with a Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7, packing six, eight, and twelve cores, respectively.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.