Time flies, half a year slips away from the fingers. In the past six months, the PC industry has not changed significantly. Although there are some changes in the ranking of PC shipments, TOP5 is still familiar to us. , Lenovo, Dell, Apple and Asus.
From the perspective of the product itself, there were some exciting technologies in the first half of the year, and these technologies are the key technologies that can enhance the experience. Let's take a look at who they are.
Eight-generation Core: Six-core CPU notebook popularization
Intel finally officially announced the high-performance mobile eight-generation Core processor in April. The 6C12T processor represented by i7-8750H has pushed the multi-core performance of notebooks to a new height. This is the biggest performance improvement of Intel in mobile in recent years. Once.
Compared with the i7-7700HQ, the flagship product of the previous generation mobile terminal, the i7-8750H has added 2 cores, 4 threads, and the frequency of the core frequency has also increased slightly. Both single-core performance and multi-core performance have made significant progress.
Intel and AMD's i7-8809G has a cross-era significance. It combines the two CPU giants for the first time, bringing consumers a GPU performance with high CPU performance and comparable mainstream graphics performance. Let the miniaturized high-performance host become a reality.
At the same time, Intel also announced that the i9 will be brought to the mobile platform, and the i9-8950HK processor will be introduced. However, it has more cores than the desktop i9. The mobile i9 is a rebranded mobile i5 overclocking i7. The i7-8750H, i9-8950HK have higher frequency and no frequency locking technology, users can get more powerful performance through overclocking.
Aurora technology: Unleash HDD potential and improve small memory PC performance
With the Intel 200 series motherboard turned out, the arrogant technology should have been a new technology last year, but a recent update has made it a force to be reckoned with this year.
With the update of the adaptation software, the AoTeng memory does not need to be deployed synchronously when the system is installed. Users can use any of the AoTeng memory to accelerate any SATA hard disk at any time, which can directly increase the sequential reading speed of the HDD. Improve 4K performance.
In addition, AoTeng memory can also improve the overall performance in small memory machines, which can increase the number of frames in the game, and improve the performance of multitasking in daily use.
In other words, in the context of memory price increases, AoTeng memory can effectively reduce the installed cost of consumers, while allowing the performance of HDD to be somewhat comparable to SSD.
Ruilong APU: The fusion vision is finally realized
On the eve of CES2018, AMD officially released a new APU processor based on Ryzen CPU architecture and Vega GPU architecture. As the only company in the industry with high-performance CPU and GPU chip technology, AMD has always regarded APU as the most important product line.
However, due to problems in architecture and process in the past few years, APU's performance and market performance are not satisfactory. With the outstanding performance of Ryzen and VEGA, the new APU has made great progress in performance, CPU performance It is 50% higher than the previous generation of products, reaching the mainstream level of the industry, and the GPU performance is increased by 40%, which is comparable to the entry level.
Ruilong APU can be said to be the first product to achieve AMD's vision of integration, enabling consumers to achieve high CPU performance and GPU performance at the same time with lower power consumption.
Qualcomm Xiaolong: Bringing new power to the PC industry
Compared with the traditional faucet, people always pay more attention to the joining of the spoilers.
Since Microsoft and Qualcomm announced the launch of Windows notebooks based on the Qualcomm platform at the 2016 WinHEC conference, more and more consumers are looking forward to the long-life and real-time online features of Qualcomm.
Just recently, the products equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chips finally went on sale, with 22 hours of battery life, unlimited 4G traffic and extremely low heat, which made AMD and Intel far behind. At the Taipei Computer Show, Qualcomm also Announced that it will bring the Snapdragon 850 chip developed for Windows10 to further improve performance and reduce power consumption.
Qualcomm's participation has also stimulated Intel to a certain extent. In addition to the joint operators to promote the development of real-time online PCs, Intel also cooperated with screen panel manufacturers to further reduce the screen power consumption to obtain longer lasting battery life.
Although there are still some problems in the performance of Xiaolong PC, Qualcomm has brought new development ideas to the PC industry, and has also stimulated the industry giants to give consumers more choices.
Narrow border game book: Make high-performance thin and lighter more portable
In addition to the development of the chip, in the first half of the year, more and more games have begun to adopt narrow border screens.
The narrow frame is good for all the screen-mounted devices. The same size of the body can have a larger screen area, the same screen area can have a smaller body size, and the 15-inch product has a 14-inch size. Portability, which has stimulated the development of high-performance thin and light notebooks to some extent.
In addition, the narrow-frame notebook also brings a more intense visual impact, and there is a great improvement in the value and style.
But unfortunately, due to the development of the screen panel, the 17-inch narrow-frame notebook still does not appear. Most of the game's screen chin is still surprisingly large, and this will be the main update point for the next generation of products.
Hidden camera: New idea for narrow border pen camera position
The development of the narrow-border screen makes the notebook's camera a device with nowhere to place. Some manufacturers choose to reserve the position of the camera on the upper frame, and some manufacturers choose to place the camera at the bottom of the screen. Huawei has hidden the camera. Inside the keyboard.
A pop-up camera doesn't really have much technical content, but with this design, Huawei has been able to increase the screen share to 91%, making it the notebook with the highest screen share in the market and bringing a new design to the industry. Ideas.
But at the same time, we might as well think about it. Is there really a need for a camera on the notebook?
TNT: Anyway, it's an innovation
Before the end of the article, we still have to talk about TNT.
All of TNT's technologies are not hammer innovation, voice interaction, touch interaction, Android-based office software, etc., but the hammer integrates these familiar operations, allowing productivity to be limited to keyboard and mouse.
TNT challenges not only the PC itself, but also the way people work. Whether you like Lao Luo or not, it will endorse TNT, and it will be another product that tries to replace PC. .
Summary: PC is still irreplaceable
In a mature and stable market, innovation is difficult and valuable.
The breaking of the IntelTick-Tock update rule has slowed down the PC's update iteration speed, but it also promoted the convergence of different vendors. The i7-8809G is the crystallization of Intel and AMD. The Qualcomm platform notebook is the crystallization of Qualcomm and Microsoft.
As far as the product level is concerned, it is difficult to make revolutionary changes in mature forms. The miniaturization of PC mainframes and the diversification of interaction modes are inevitable trends. Even though shipments are still not improving, I believe that the future of PCs is still bright. It is still irreplaceable in the foreseeable future.
