It's only been a week since Nvidia revealed Turing and a renewed focus on real-time ray-tracing technology for the next generation of games. Fast-forward just a few days later and IFA pretty much stole all the headlines with an inundation of brand new laptops and smartphones set to launch before the end of the year. There were definitely more at show than we had initially anticipated with an arguably longer list of announcements when compared to Computex just a few months prior.
Here is a condensed list of some major products coming soon from top OEMs:
- Acer Swift 7 laptop
- Acer Chromebook 514
- Acer Predator Triton 900 2-in-1 convertible
- Acer Aspire 5 and Aspire 7 (w/ Kaby Lake-G!) laptops
- Acer Swift 3 and Swift 5 w/ Whiskey Lake-U laptops
- Asus ZenBook 13-inch, 14-inch, and 15-inch (UX333, UX433, UX533) laptops
- Asus ZenBook Flip 13 and Flip 15 w/ Whiskey Lake-U convertibles
- Blackberry Key2 LE smartphone
- Casio WSD-F30 smartwatch
- Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 w/ Amber Lake convertible
- Dell XPS 13 9370 w/ Core i3 Kaby Lake-R laptop
- Dell Inspiron 13, 15, and 17 7000 refresh convertibles
- Dell Inspiron 14 5000 convertible
- Dell Inspiron 14 Chromebook
- Dell Vostro 5000 refresh laptop
- Honor Play smartphone
- Honor 8X smartphone
- Honor Magic 2 smartphone
- HTC U12 Life smartphone
- MSI P65 Creator business laptop
- Lenovo Yoga Book C930 convertible
- Lenovo Yoga S730 laptop
- Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme laptop
- Lenovo Yoga Chromebook 15-inch
- Lenovo C330 Chromebook
- Lenovo S330 Chromebook
- Lenovo Yoga C630 w/ Snapdragon 850 convertible
- Lenovo Legion Y530 w/ GTX 1060 gaming laptop
- LG G7 One and G7 Fit smartphones
- Sony XZ3 smartphone
- Toshiba Portege X30T detachable
- ZTE Axon 9 Pro smartphone
Intel also unveiled its Whiskey Lake-U series of CPUs set to directly supplant Kaby Lake-R. The new 14 nm++ processors focus on integrated Gigabit wireless features and offloading specific workloads to the PCH for improved performance. Amber Lake-Y was also touched upon, but it appears to be nothing more than just Kaby Lake-Y in the same 14 nm fabrication process but with higher clock rates and higher TDP potential.
Outside of IFA, the news was quiet with not much to comment. Asus opened up pre-orders for its upcoming Zephyrus GX531 and Strix GL704 gaming laptops while first-gen AMD Threadripper CPUs received steep price cuts now that second-gen Threadripper models are available. Qualcomm may be preparing new Snapdragon SoCs for Windows 10 as well.