CES 2022 kicked off with a bang! Major kudos to Gordon and Adam for holding down a massive
4 and a half hour long live stream, and brought commentary to the big three PC keynote;
AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. But 4 and half hours is a lot to take in, so in this video,
I’m cutting straight to the chase with the major announcements from each of the keynotes. Strap
in because we’re putting this one in hyperdrive so I can get you up to speed on the top news.
Let’s start with Nvidia, and it’s keynote focused heavily on games and the RTX features in them.
Expect a major push for DLSS this year - one like we’ve never seen before - but Nvidia did
announce some new and arguably exciting hardware releases coming as well.
If you’re into laptop gaming, then you’ll be excited to hear that Nvidia has announced
its upcoming RTX 3080 Ti and RTX 3070 Ti mobile GPUs. The RTX 3080 Ti is getting
16GB of the ‘fastest ever’ GDDR6 memory and Nvidia is claiming it’s faster than a desktop RTX Titan.
While Nvidia didn’t give us much on the RTX 3070 Ti laptop GPU,
the expected performance target is 1.7x that over the last generation RTX 2070.
Laptops aren’t all that got love at the Nvidia Keynote, desktops did get a bit as well at both
ends of the price spectrum. The RTX 3050 for desktop is finally coming, and it’ll be packing
8GB of GDDR6 and 9 shader teraflops. It’s coming in at a comfortable $249 MSRP and launching on
January 27, which was about all the details we got on it, so more will follow soon I’m sure.
On the other end of the spectrum is the upcoming RTX 3090 Ti - yes, an even higher-end RTX GPU
is inbound. The only details teased were 40 shader TFLOPS, 78 ray tracing TFLOPS,
and 320 tensor TFLOPS. There will still be 24GB of GDDR6X memory on a 384-bit bus,
but this time with an even faster 21Gbps speed, making over 1TB of maximum memory bandwidth. No
launch date or pricing was given, unfortunately. When it comes to street pricing for both cards,
we’ll definitely see how it shakes out as supply is still constrained across the board.
Next up is Intel, which hit us with a barrage of upcoming releases in the CPU space for
both desktop and laptops, along with some more details around its upcoming Arc GPUs.
I’m going to go through each and every one of Intel’s upcoming 12th gen Alder Lake CPUs
in full detail - just kidding! If you want to see what each of the CPUs has to offer
you’ll find a link in the description which takes you straight to Mark Hachman’s full breakdown. But
believe me, it’s everything to fill out a full 12th-gen lineup so too much to go into here.
Non-K SKUs along with lower end B660 motherboards are quite welcome and
help to round out Intel’s CPU offerings. One surprise was a new cooler design that might
have you think twice about setting them aside. The New Intel Laminar Coolers look quite nice,
and according to very recent reviews like that from Hardware Unboxed, they prove to be quite
the value add. Between lower end parts, B660, and these new coolers, it’s turning out to be a
good thing for the cost-conscious who are looking to hop into the Intel 12th-gen desktop family.
Mobile is also getting the 12th-gen love with its Intel Core H, Core P, and Core U line of
mobile processors. Intel is claiming that the Intel Core H lineup will make for the
‘best mobile gaming platform’ and with dozens of new laptops shipping soon with 12th-gen inside.
We’ll find out what that means in reviews later,
since we didn’t get any glimpse of those numbers from Intel themselves.
But what you really wanted to hear from Intel was an update on Intel Arc.
Like when can we expect the graphics cards to hit store shelves and how much they’re going to
cost. Well, we didn’t get either one of those answered clearly. What we were told was that
they are shipping first quarter of this year and expect these to only be in OEMs only at first.
We’ll have to continue to wait - or as Gordon put it on stream #WaitForArc. Fingers crossed
for some more info very VERY soon. To sum it all up, there seem to be tons
of laptop and desktop wins in the CPU space, but we got no clear details on graphics cards.
Now what about AMD? Well, they’ve been busy little bees and that’s why I saved them for
last. From mobile processors to desktop evolutions, AMD is updating everything.
Laptops are getting a 6nm upgrade with the Ryzen 6000 Series, but the node change isn’t all. The
Ryzen 6000 Series mobile chips will feature up to 8 Zen 3+ cores that should be capable of hitting
5GHz, on mobile no less. Further specs include PCIe Gen 4, DDR5 and LPDDR5 support, USB4 - AND
RDNA2 graphics are finally in an APU. Expect to see these chips working their way into a very
large number of laptops soon, everything ranging from ultra-sleek portables to gaming behemoths.
AMD also announced the Radeon S models, a more power-efficient revision of RDNA2
featured in the RX 6800s, RX 6700s, and RX 6600s. These chips will still use
existing RX 6000 Series packaging but with aggressive power gating and targeting.
The RX 6000M Series however is where things get cranked to 11
with the new RX 6850M XT featuring up to a 7% faster core and 14% faster memory over the RX
6800M. There will also be an RX 6650M and RX 6650M XT joining the family that will be targeting the
35w range for entry-level mobile gaming. Desktop users will be given the opportunity
to wage war on each other for the chance to pick up Radeon’s latest GPU release:
the RX 6500 XT. This will be the latest and least expensive addition to the RDNA 2 lineup
of gaming graphics cards, and it’ll be coming in at a much more attractive $199 price tag
and target 1080p High gaming. It’s also using the new 6nm process node, so that’s interesting.
While AMD showed this GPU to be quite potent over older RX 570s and GTX 1650 class GPUs,
they did a good job keeping quiet about the 4GB frame buffer. While there’s already been
a large group groaning about the small pool of memory, this is targeting 1080p High AND
there’s not an ethereum miner in the world who would be interested in this part. 4GB of VRAM
with a 64-bit bus isn’t good for mining, so this could wind up being a great move for gamers.
Now on to desktop CPUs! We are finally going to be treated to Rzyen with V-cache. To prove one of
my 2022 predictions wrong within the first week, the V-cache chip we’ll be getting treated to will
be of the 8 core variety and will be called the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Overall specs don’t change much
over the Ryzen 7 5800X except for two key areas, clock speed, and cache. The cache is boosted by
a massive 64MB resulting in a total of 96MB of L3 cache for the 5800X3D over the 5800X’s 32MB.
There is a reduction of the core clock by 200Mhz but that doesn’t seem to be a negative move
as AMD claims this chip can run with Intel’s best gaming chip, the Core i9-12900K.
To top it off, the curtains were pulled back slightly for Zen 4 and the new AM5 platform
that is expected to launch in the second half of this year. AM5 will be a departure from the PGA
sockets, switching to an LGA design. This means that the pins will no longer be on the CPU itself
but on the board, akin to how Intel has operated for over a decade. Along with AM5, we’re going to
see a lot of other 5’s as well, like DDR5 and PCIe Gen5. As a show of good faith, Dr. Lisa Su showed
off Halo Infinite Running on an early engineering sample of Ryzen 7000. While we didn’t get any
sort of frame counter, and the image quality was diminished thanks to streaming video compression,
it does show they have it all up and running! AMD isn’t letting off the gas for 2022.
And with that, the highlights have been lit. If you want to dig in deeper to any of these
announcements then feel free to hit up the plethora of links to PCWorld.com down in
the description so that you can digest them at your own pace. And if you found this condensed
version of 4 and half hours of content helpful or informative please let me know by hitting that
like button. As always, be sure you’re subscribed here at PCWorld for even more CES 2022 and PC
hardware and software goodness! ******END******