Taipei, Taiwan — COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2019 begins today with an emphasis on five main themes: artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things (IoT); 5G; blockchain; innovations and startups; and gaming and extended reality. Over five days, 1,685 exhibitors from 30 countries and territories.
The exhibit spans 5,508 booths, nearly a 10 percent increase from last year. Exhibitors are expected to display their latest products and advancements at one of the world’s leading business-to-business information and communications technology (ICT) trade shows.
In addition to its traditional goals of connecting the complete ICT industry supply chain and promoting vendor-client relationships, COMPUTEX’s mission also includes providing the best platform for IoT technology applications and developing the startup ecosystem.
The exhibition aims to create synergy between global and local resources in a comprehensive platform for technical exchange and collaboration, innovative thinking and resource integration.
“The technology industry is constantly changing and we are now entering a new era of innovation; therefore we are always transforming and evolving,” said Walter Yeh, president and CEO of the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA), one of the event’s organizers.
He cited the World Economic Forum as saying last year that Taiwan is one of four “super innovators,” alongside Germany, the US and Switzerland, which he attributed to Taiwan’s “vibrant startup ecosystem and strong digital economy,” as well as the support of the government.
Yeh highlighted the InnoVEX exhibit, which he said links together the entire supply chain and promotes startups by helping them search for partners and investors.
The fourth edition of the exhibit, which starts at Taipei World Trade Center Exhibition Hall 1 on May 29 and ends on May 31, is to feature 467 startups from 25 countries, as well as several country and territory pavilions. Key exhibitors include Audi, Qualcomm, StarFab Accelerator and XR Express.
For the first time in the trade show’s decades-long history, a CEO keynote was incorporated into the international press conference. Dr. Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), was invited to address the media and provide insights into the state of the industry, as well as the challenges and opportunities ahead.
She also called up two of AMD’s local partners — Acer and ASUS — to share their success stories, and provided an exclusive look at what the chipmaker, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, has in store for the exhibition and beyond.
“As exciting as the last 50 years were, the next 50 years for technology is much, much more exciting,” Su said, adding that there is “tremendous demand for computing” focused on two key areas: demand for better experiences and for compute power.
"The first involves the hundreds of devices people use in their daily lives and the desire for them to be improved. The vast amount of data generated by that usage drives the demand for compute, whose focus on making that data “smarter … to help us make decisions and … to help us make our lives more easy” requires a massive amount of computational horsepower."
“New technologies can make a huge, huge difference,” Su said. “But one of the things about being in semiconductors is you have to make big bets.”
To that end, the chipmaker has invested in high-performance leadership, primarily by focusing on process technology — partnering with local chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) to introduce cutting-edge chips on the 7-nanometer process — and on faster cores.
Su introduced AMD’s products and goals before unveiling the chipmaker’s newest, cutting-edge products, which are to be on display at COMPUTEX. She started with the EPYC Rome data center processor, which was accompanied by a demonstration in which it significantly outperformed its counterpart from rival chipmaker Intel.
That was followed by an introduction to the Navi gaming GPU family based on the “Radeon DNA” architecture.
However, the CEO saved the best for last: The all-new 3rd-generation AMD Ryzen CPUs, the first desktop chips featuring the 7-nanometer Zen 2 core.
Finally, before the assembled media and audiences online, Su unveiled to the world the flagship Ryzen 9 3900x processor, which in a demonstration outpaced its nearest competitor, despite being significantly more power efficient and costing about half as much.
“Innovation is what technology leadership is all about,” Su said.