Computex 2026 is set to be the most consequential computing conference in many years.
The annual computing showcase that is set to take over Taipei, Taiwan, June 2 through June 5, will bring us all new computing platforms we’ve seen hinted at for months. While Nvidia will be busy hyping up its new homegrown ARM-based CPUs, we’ll likely see refreshed laptops that hope to fight back against the budget-end king of the ring, the MacBook Neo. New single processors with CPU and GPU capabilities combined are reaching unbelievable performance, making at-home computing more accessible than ever.
At the same time, the computing industry as a whole is threatened by dire tidings due to the skyrocketing cost of memory—including SSDs and RAM. All the major players in silicon, including Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, and—of course—Nvidia, are set to showcase new computing platforms for PCs in all form factors. In the same breath, each company will want to promote processors designed for datacenters and AI hyperscalers, driving cloud-based compute that’s exacerbating the RAM pricing apocalypse.
There’s a reason you can still hold hope in your heart. Computex is renowned for allowing PC and peripheral makers to get weird with it. Computex 2026 may be the best showcase for why the era of “personal computing” is worth fighting for. Gizmodo will be in Taipei and live blogging it all.
AMD’s Own ‘AI Supercomputer’ Is More PC-Like Than Nvidia’s
Let the APU (accelerated processing unit) battle commence. AMD’s new Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495 chip seems beefy since it’s packing 16 Zen 5 CPU cores and a 40 CU (compute units) GPU. Despite that, the new chip doesn’t seem like a major upgrade from the last-gen Strix Halo lineup. That’s mostly because it’s using the same RDNA 3.5 GPU microarchitecture on a slightly updated Radeon 8065S graphics chip.
As if you couldn’t get enough “Halo,” AMD is also producing its own mini PC using both last- and current-gen Halo chips called—of course—Ryzen AI Halo. As you can guess by the title, it’s built for AI. Compared to Nvidia’s DGX Spark “AI supercomputer,” AMD’s version is running on good ol’ x86 and supports Windows. By comparison, Nvidia’s little AI box runs on ARM and only supports a customized Linux backend. —Kyle Barr
