10 PCWorld FEBRUARY 2019NEWS 6 IMPORTANT CES 2019 REVEALS
“lousy.”) We’ll be able to confirm that
performance ourselves soon, as the Radeon
VII will launch on February 7, at a cost of
$699. Sadly, AMD didn’t provide any
updates on its next-gen “Navi” architecture
expected to release later this year.
AMD also offered a preview of its
3rd-generation Ryzen CPUs, although details
were light. CEO Lisa Su said it “will absolutely
set the bar for performance and power
efficiency,” and in a head-to-head live
comparison against Intel’s flagship Core
i9-9900K (go.pcworld.com/i990) onstage, a
similarly equipped 8-core, 16-thread 3rd-gen
Ryzen chip scored 2,057 points in
Cinebench, topping the 9900K’s 2,
points—and with a significantly lower power
draw. Impressive stuff. The new Ryzen CPUswill also be the first
mainstream
processors to support
PCI-E 4.0. Look for the
chips to launch
sometime in the
middle of the year.
But maybe not
with that 8-core chip
as its standard bearer.
In a candid, wide-
ranging interview with
a small roundtable of
reporters after the
keynote, Su strongly
hinted that 3rd-gen
Ryzen could hit 16 cores (go.pcworld.com/
rayt). Yes, please!- WILD LAPTOP
INNOVATION
Computer makers are already putting all of
the new hardware from AMD, Intel, and
Nvidia to good use, too. Sure, we saw the
expected updates to tried-and-true laptops
like the Dell XPS 13 (go.pcworld.com/dx13)
and Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 (go.pcworld.com/
thp1). And they look great! But more
interestingly, there were a ton of outright wild
notebooks at CES 2019.
The new HP Omen 15 (go.pcworld.com/
om15) offers a screaming-fast 240Hz display
unheard of in laptops. The MSI GS75 Stealth
(go.pcworld.com/gs75) manages to squeeze