Here is what’s happening at Computex 2024

If you’re still under the impression that an original MSI Claw might be a worthy purchase, I beg you to reconsider. MSI has now announced not one but two successors to the embarrassing handheld that are coming this fall — and hinting it might show off yet another one at CES in January.

MSI already revealed an eight-inch Lunar Lake version dubbed the MSI Claw 8 AI Plus at Computex this week, but the company will put Intel’s Lunar Lake into a new seven-inch version at the same time. MSI Claw product management director Clifford Chun revealed the existence of that handheld in an interview with PCWorld and explained that both devices should arrive with the launch of Intel’s more efficient Lunar Lake chips this fall.

Adata has become the latest company to join the hype surrounding PC gaming handhelds — but the XPG Nia prototype it revealed during Computex 2024 is completely different from what we’ve seen so far. The handheld is the first to come with LPCAMM2 memory, making it far easier to swap out and upgrade RAM.

As reported by Liliputing, you’ll be able to access the device’s storage beneath the kickstand on the back of the device. You can also remove and replace the device’s M.2 2230 SSD. These aren’t the only things you’ll be able to mod, either.

When I asked for more PC cases with wood panels, I didn’t realize we’d get another one so soon; on Wednesday, gaming PC case maker Fractal announced its next two small form-factor cases, one of which includes a slatted wooden panel— but it’s also expanding its product line up to include gaming chairs and gaming headsets for the first time.

Its first gaming chair, Refine, looks much closer to a Herman Miller than something from Secretlab. But its mesh seatback is tall like a traditional gaming chair, and it has the same ergonomic features built into modern, high-end office and gaming chairs.

It’s handheld season, and the Asus ROG Ally X and MSI Claw 8 AI Plus aren’t the only second-gen Windows gaming handhelds in town — GPU manufacturer Zotac has officially revealed its Zone at Computex, and it does a few things differently than the competition.

Zotac already teased that the Zone would have an OLED screen, something that only the Steam Deck OLED has managed in PC handhelds before — as well as two-stage adjustable triggers like an Xbox Elite gamepad and drift resistant Hall effect joysticks. But did you know it’ll also have symmetrical PlayStation-esque joysticks, programmable dials around each one, twin Steam Deck-like trackpads, a small built-in kickstand, a Windows Hello camera instead of a fingerprint reader, and both top and bottom USB4 ports?

Well, here’s Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, signing a woman’s chest in a crowded booth at Computex. In the video below, you can see he asks whether this is a good idea before he eventually signs the woman’s top. He then returns to signing more traditional fare.

This isn’t an unusual sight when it comes to actors or musicians. But can you imagine Tim Cook doing that after an iPhone event? Or Sundar Pichai after Google I/O?

Just three months after releasing its first gaming handheld PC to damning reviews — here’s mine — MSI is already announcing a likely replacement. The MSI Claw 8 AI Plus swaps its lackluster Intel Meteor Lake chip for the brand-new Lunar Lake ones, while replacing its seven-inch, 1080p 120Hz variable resolution rate screen for a larger eight-inch one. (But there will be a new 7-inch one too, as we learned days after I first wrote this story.)

Perhaps even more importantly, the 8-incher will boast up to an 80 watt-hour battery, MSI tells The Verge — tying it with the recently announced Asus ROG Ally X for biggest battery in a PC gaming handheld. Despite the larger screen, it’ll still offer a smooth 120Hz refresh rate with VRR, writes MSI marketing specialist Anne Lee.

Last year, Intel boasted that its Meteor Lake processors, dubbed Core Ultra, represented the company’s biggest architectural shift in 40 years. But Intel didn’t settle down after that: today it’s revealing how Lunar Lake, its next laptop chip coming this fall, will overhaul the formula yet again.

Facing the existential threat of Arm and the opportunity of AI PCs, Intel has apparently ditched its famous tick-tock cadence for a whole new system-on-chip design, one that not only triples the size and more than quadruples the performance of its AI accelerator, but promises up to 14 percent faster CPU performance at the same clockspeed, 50 percent more graphics performance, and up to 60 percent better battery life than last year’s model.

AMD is launching its first Zen 5 desktop processors in July, with the Ryzen 9 9950X flagship leading the pack as “the world’s most powerful desktop consumer processor.” Based on AMD’s existing AM5 platform, the new Ryzen 9000 series of CPUs include the Ryzen 9 9950X, Ryzen 9 9900X, Ryzen 7 9700X, and Ryzen 5 9600X.

The flagship Ryzen 9 9950X is a 16-core, 32-thread CPU, with 80MB of L2+L3 cache and a 5.7GHz boost clock. AMD is promising around a 16 percent instructions per cycle (IPC) uplift in performance over the previous-generation Ryzen CPUs, with big promises of performance gains in productivity as well as gaming.

AMD announced at Computex 2024 its next generation of Ryzen laptop processors for generative AI workloads: the Ryzen AI 300 Series. It’s a re-brand of its top-tier Ryzen 9 chips. The new naming convention still includes the HX suffix AMD introduced in 2022, but it doesn’t indicate how many watts of power the chip draws. Instead, HX will simply refer to “top of stack” or the best and fastest Ryzen AI 300 chip.

The new Ryzen AI chips are built on AMD’s latest architectures for neural, integrated graphics, and general processing: XDNA2 for the NPU, RDNA 3.5 for the iGPU, which now has up to 16 compute units, and Zen 5 for the CPU. The first two processors in this series are the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and Ryzen AI 9 365. Both have 50 TOPS NPU, but the HX variant is the higher-end of the two.

When Nvidia first announced G-Assist it was an April Fools’ prank in 2017 that joked about an AI assistant being able to help you play a game while you ran to the door for your pizza delivery. Now, seven years later, G-Assist is back as a real demo of a powerful GeForce AI assistant that Nvidia might eventually bring to life for game developers and RTX GPU owners.

Project G-Assist is only a tech demonstration right now, but it’s a brief look at how an AI assistant could guide you through PC games and even configure optimal settings for you based on chat inputs in the future.

Nvidia just gave the PC gaming industry a reason to shrink its biggest graphics cards and produce smallish cases. It’s not what I expected, but I think it might actually help. Read before you judge, friends — I was definitely ready to call out some Nvidia BS, but I’ve mostly come around.

When leakers revealed last month that Nvidia would help steer its graphics card partners toward smaller gaming PCs, I began to daydream. Might we finally see a genuinely small Nvidia powerhouse like AMD’s old R9 Nano? Could Nvidia at least convince partners to produce two-slot GPUs like many of its own Founders Edition cards?

Nvidia and AMD are gearing up to launch gaming laptops that include the AI Copilot Plus features that Microsoft just announced for Qualcomm-powered laptops. At Computex today, Nvidia briefly teased that “RTX AI PC” laptops are on the way from Asus and MSI that will eventually include Copilot Plus PC features.

“Newly announced RTX AI PC laptops from ASUS and MSI feature up to GeForce RTX 4070 GPUs and power-efficient systems-on-a-chip with Windows 11 AI PC capabilities,” says Nvidia in a blog post. Nvidia confirmed to The Verge in a briefing that these laptops will come with AMD’s latest Strix CPUs.