The Computer Industry Gathers in Taipei for Computex 2024

Representatives from 1,500 companies in 36 countries turned out for the annual Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan on June 4-7. With somewhere around 50,000 attendees, Computex is one of the largest computer conferences in the world, and it serves as a showcase for hardware companies to roll out their latest products and announce their latest news. The major vendors did not disappoint. As expected, supercomputing and AI were major themes for this year’s event, with vendors responding to the demands for higher density, lower power, and better support for machine learning.

Intel announced the new Xeon 6 series processors designed for “high-density, scale-out workloads” and “performance per watt gains of up to 2.6x.” They also announced the Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3 accelerator kits, which they say will deliver high performance at up to one-third of the cost of competitive systems, and they rolled out the Lunar Lake client processor, which is designed to support the new generation of AI-ready PCs.

AMD unveiled a new roadmap for the Instinct accelerator series and previewed the fifth-generation EPYC server processors, which are targeted for the second half of 2024. NVIDIA, whose stock price has recently soared due to the dominance of its AI-related GPUs and accelerators, was also out with a series of AI-related announcements. Many of NVIDIA’s offerings fell into the gaming space, which they also dominate, but some were of more general interest to the AI community, including the RTX AI Toolkit for building custom AI models on PCs with RTX GPUs.

For additional announcements from Computex 2024, see the News page at the Computex website.