36 PCWorld JULY 2019NEWS MONSTROUS HARDWARE FROM COMPUTEX 2019
For even more juicy AMD info that wasn’t
announced onstage—like Threadripper’s
status, Radeon ray tracing, and whether
benchmarks matter—check out our interview
transcript with CEO Lisa Su (go.pcworld.
com/lisa).- SUPERCHARGED
PCIE 4.0 SSDS
Sure, the Radeon RX 5700 tease is exciting
and all, but when it comes to PCIe 4.0
support specifically, moving to the cutting-
edge interface should provide a much
bigger boost to systems loaded down with
NVMe storage. At Computex, Corsair
unveiled the MP600 Force Series SSD (go.
pcworld.com/mp60), a drive that taps into
PCIe 4.0’s capabilities to unlock ludicrous
speed. This beast hits 4,950MBps sequential
read speeds and 4,250MBps sequential
write speeds. Oh my. Even better? As
impressive as that is—and it is—Corsair’s SSD
doesn’t come close to saturating PCIe 4.0’s
theoretical 8GBps maximum.
Corsair wasn’t the only
manufacturer climbing this horse. Gigabyte
also showed an Aorus-branded PCIe 4.0 SSD
(go.pcworld.com/aros) with a whopping 8TB
of capacity. Don’t expect that to come cheap.
If you build a new rig this fall and load up
with Ryzen 3000, the Radeon RX 5700, an
X570 motherboard, and one of these
monsters, you could live the next-gen life with
a full PCIe 4.0-compatible system. Giggity.
But the industry’s eyes ever point forward:
Also announced at Computex, the PCI
Express 5.0 spec will bring 128 gigabytes per
second of throughput (go.pcworld.com/
ex50) to your PC...someday. Don’t expect it
anytime soon.- INTEL DIVES INTO
10NM ICE LAKE
AMD’s triumphant keynote couldn’t take
away from Intel’s blockbuster news: After
years of delays, frustrations, and endless
14nm process tweaks, Intel’s 10nm
processors are finally here in the form of
10th-gen “Ice Lake” Core
processors (go.pcworld.
com/10gn) for laptops.
Somewhat surprisingly,
Intel played coy about
detailed speeds and
feeds of individual
chips, but several PC
makers already showed
systems with Ice Lake inside. - 10th-gen Core chips don’t quite hit the