In the technology calendar, there are generally two major events every year. Specifically, CES (coming soon) and Computex (coming in May). These shows provide the entire technology industry with some of the best indications as to not only what we can only expect in the near (or far) future but also are often used to unveil, formally announce or even release brand new products to the market.
As such, many (including ourselves) firmly have CES 2019 in our sights. The event, which is set to be held in Las Vegas will start on January 8th and will run until the 12th. Yes, five full days of technology goodness!
With this in mind, however, we’ll take a brief look into some of the announcements and news we expect to hear from the event!
Edit – We wrote this before CES 2019, however, due to a little bug it seems to have published much later than intended. The good news is, however, that we’ve already been proven right on more than a few things!
We might as well start with what (or should that be who?) will be one of the biggest ‘shakers and movers’ expected from this year’s event. In a nutshell, we’re expecting some pretty huge announcements from AMD at CES 2019. With Team Red set to host the keynote presentation, we are expecting some pretty big things. Like when Jensen Huang turns up for Nvidia, you know that when AMD’s CEO Dr Lisa Su is going to be speaking, it’s not going to be idle chit-chat.
So, what can we expect? Well, frankly, based on the speculation, the list is pretty huge. It’s also a case of where to start!
One of the biggest expectations of AMD is that they will formally announce a range of 7nm processors and graphics cards. For those of you unfamiliar with this terminology, I’ll try and keep it simple. 7nm simply refers to the distance between transistors located in the processor. The closer they are, the more efficient they are as the electronic information has a shorter distance to travel. Shorter distances also mean less heat! In other words, low numbers are good and with the industry standard currently at around 10nm-14nm, this makes 7nm quite a big deal.
In terms of processors and graphics cards (specifically with the Navi architecture for the latter), this potentially means much faster operating speeds.
Given that Intel is currently struggling to meet production levels to produce 10nm and 12nm, AMD could be onto a massive advantage here.
You can read more about this in the article here!
We have already seen rather a lot of information suggesting that AMD will be announcing the upcoming release of the 3rd generation of Ryzen processors. Admittedly, this is something of a moderate surprise as it will likely present the 3rd release in the series in 3 years. Owning a generation 1 Ryzen, suddenly I’m starting to feel very obsolete.
With the aforementioned 7nm technology expected these may be a huge improvement on even the current 2nd-generation. Additionally, the anticipated flagship ‘Ryzen 9 3800x’ looks to be an absolute beast if the speculation is correct.
You can read more about this in the article here!
While AMD might be setting themselves up to take centre stage at CES 2019, don’t think that Nvidia doesn’t have a few tricks up their sleeve. With the current 20XX range of graphics cards having been released towards the latter part of last year, we’re not necessarily expecting anything groundbreaking. At the same time though, we do expect more than a few interesting releases.
We must admit, one of the reasons we’re looking forward to CES 2019 is the fact that we can stop speculating about the upcoming release of the Nvidia RTX 2060 graphics cards. The amount of news, leaks, images, speculation, and even specifications for the upcoming graphics card has been huge. This, we might add, all without Nvidia actually confirming its existence.
Nvidia do, however, seem to rather like this. If for no other reason than they seem to love seeing the misinformation flying around.
So, what do we know? Well, we fully expect Nvidia to formally announce the RTX 2060 graphics card. In addition, we also fully anticipate them slating it for release within the next couple of weeks. We’ve heard rumours of a January 15th release for the graphics card and you can make of those what you will.
With the overwhelming popularity of the Nvidia 1060 graphics card, it’s going to be interesting to see what an impact this new iteration (with its ray tracing goodness) has.
We have literally so much information about these cards that we’re not even going to bore you creating segways. The below provides some of the best information we’ve found so far.
With the overwhelming popularity of the Nvidia 1060 graphics card, it’s going to be interesting to see what an impact this new iteration (with its ray tracing goodness) has.
While the Nvidia 2080/Ti has already been released for a few months now, that doesn’t mean that new models are not expected. It’s widely believed that both MSI, Gigabyte and Zotac will be using the event to announce new versions of the Nvidia graphics card. In this regard, however, we’re more likely to be looking at particularly high-end models.
What do we mean by this? Well, put simply models designed specifically with extreme overclocking in mind. These include;
Every indication suggests that the ‘tweaking’ will allow for some amazing performance figures from these hardcore models. We can’t wait to see just how good they are!
Despite the 20XX series having been released for about 3-4 months now, we have still yet to officially see an m-series version of the graphics card. For those of you unaware of the term, this basically means a 20XX graphics card designed to work within a laptop. At CES 2019, however, this seems set to change.
At the very least, we’re expecting the announcement of an M-series release for the currently released models of the graphics card series. In other words, the 2070, 2080, and 2080Ti.
Jumping the gun a little, a leak from a Chinese manufacturer last week even gave us some indication as to their likely specification.
If a new M-series of graphics cards are announced, you can surely expect some big announcements from laptop manufacturers in the coming weeks!
Anyone who has been paying attention to the rumours surrounding the Nvidia 2060 may have noted that model variants do seem to be a pretty big factor at the moment. Specifically, whether the card uses GDDR5, GDDR5X or GDDR6 memory. With it recently being revealed that GDDR6 memory is around 70% more expensive, it’s likely that we may see a number of graphics card releases (across all manufacturers) which will offer alternative memory types.
This will, hopefully, result in some nice competitive pricing. Particularly for the most recent Nvidia series which is, to say the least, a little pricey.
Gigabyte already seems to well onboard with this concept!
There will, of course, be a lot more news, announcements and releases from many manufacturers. We will, therefore, try to cover some of the ‘key highlight’ points we expect from the show below.
Out of everything tech related, the only major omission from the event would appear to be Intel. While we do, of course, fully expect them to be in attendance, we have had no indication that anything particularly exciting will be revealed, teased or unveiled. At best, we can hope for perhaps some news on their graphics card design, albeit that is highly-speculative and perhaps overly-optimistic!
Based on the above, CES 2019 is looking to be pretty exciting. It is, of course, hard to overlook the fact that at this point in time, AMD seems set to steal the show in terms of announcements. With a lot of other good stuff planned though, we’re always ready for more than a few surprises!
Rest assured, we will be there physically in attendance to bring you the hottest news straight from the showroom floor!
What do you think? What are you looking forward to from CES 2019? – Let us know in the comments!
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