Though the Omicron surge has somewhat taken off the sheen of what was supposed to be a completely in-person show this year, it hasn’t stopped planned product launches and announcements. Let’s look at the top five announcements from CES 2022 that could kickstart new trends in the tech industry.
For the 2022 edition, the organizers of CES planned an in-person event, hosting over 2,100 companies from across the globe showcasing their new wares. However, a recent surge of Omicron has forced many vendors to switch to a digital-only presence. The list includes Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, Twitter, Lenovo, T-Mobile, Sony, AT&T, TikTok, OnePlus, Pinterest, Alphabet-owned Waymo, and Intel.Â
However, there’s a lot you can catch up on by registeringOpens a new window online, and here’s a list of top tech announcements from the annual electronics trade show that you can’t miss.Â
Let’s get started.
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PCIe 5.0 SSDs
CES 2022 brings great news for organizations looking to adopt next-generation enterprise servers for their storage and data processing needs. At the trade show, Samsung will unveil the PM1743 SSD for enterprise servers which, the company says, was built by integrating its advanced sixth-generation V-NAND with the latest PCIe 5.0 interface.
According to Samsung, PCIe 5.0 offers a bandwidth of 32 Giga transfers per second (GT/s), doubling PCIe 4.0. The PM1743 SSD will feature a sequential read speed of up to 13,000 Mbps, offering 1.9x and 1.7x faster speeds than previous PCIe 4.0-based products. It will also provide improved power efficiency of up to 608 MB/s per watt, 30% better than what PCIe 4.0 offered. The launch will make the PM1743 SSD, developed in partnership with Intel, the industry’s first PCIe 5.0 SSD.Â
“Intel has been working with Samsung to test Samsung’s newest PCIe NVMe SSD, the PM1743. In the near future, we strongly believe that PCIe Gen5 systems with high-speed NVMe SSDs will have the ability to transform applications such as AI/ML and high-performance databases,†said Jim Pappas, director of technology initiatives at Intel Corporation.
Next-Gen CPUs
2022 could prove to be a great year for high-performance computing via next-generation desktops and laptops, thanks to advancements made by CPU and GPU leaders such as Intel, AMD, and Nvidia. Intel, seeking to re-establish itself as an undisputed leader in the global chip market, looks set to unveil a new line of 12th-gen Alder Lake CPUs for laptops and desktops, offering higher clock speeds, power and efficiency. Â
What’s interesting about this new lineup is that the chips could be among the first to debut Intel’s new 10nm chips, something the company has been working on for years. Many of these CPUs will offer up to 16 performance and efficiency cores and come with PCIe 5.0 lanes, Intel’s new Z690 motherboard, and an upgraded cooler. The new chips may also support Wi-Fi 6E, USB 3.2 Gen 2, and Thunderbolt 4.
In response to Intel’s Alder Lake CPUs that, according to some experts, may outperform AMD’s Zen3 Ryzen chips, rumors indicate AMD will launch its next-generation Zen 4 chips to restore order. However, most experts also believe AMD could light up CES with a new line of refreshed Zen 3 CPUs that offer enhanced performance and power efficiency.
We know so far that AMD will launch several Zen3+ APUs, codenamed “Rembrandt,†for notebooks. These APUs, named Ryzen 9 6980HX, Ryzen 9 6900HX, and Ryzen 7 6800H, will feature TSMC’s 6 nm node, compared to 7 nm nodes in Zen 3 APUs and eight cores and 16 threads each. There’ll also be one RDNA2-based GPU for notebooks. Nvidia, meanwhile, is said to launch the GeForce RTX 3050 and RTX 3090 Ti desktop GPUs at CES 2022.
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Netgear’s Nighthawk RAXE300 WiFi 6E Router
For organizations looking to onboard high-speed WiFi routers that support the latest WiFi 6 band, CES will see Netgear unveil its latest Nighthawk RAXE300 Tri-Band WiFi 6E router that could support speeds of up to 7.8Gb/s in a home setting. The WiFi 6 spectrum, opened up by the FCC, will help decongest existing WiFi bands and has opened up the 6GHz band for unlicensed use. The new band offers a maximum speed of 9.6 Gbps.
According to the WiFi Alliance, a WiFi 6 network is roughly 40 percent faster than WiFi 5. It uses the 2.4GHz frequency range, which offers a more extended range and is resilient against physical interference from walls and other blockers. “WiFi 6 is much better at maintaining steady top speeds while connected to many devices at the same time, even where previous WiFi versions would stumble,†it says.Â
Netgear’s new Nighthawk RAXE300 router will simultaneously support as many as eight WiFi streams across the 6GHz, 5GHz, and 2.4GHz bands. The use of the latest WiFi standard ensures that it’ll be relevant for many years to come, even though its price tag is on a higher side at $400 apiece. Organizations will also have to onboard new devices that can support WiFi 6 to make the most of the next-gen routers.
Avalanche Computing’s New Low Code AI Tool
While it isn’t really a developer-centric forum, CES 2022 will delight developers this year by hosting the launch of a new low-code AI toolOpens a new window named hAIsten AI by Taiwanese deep tech and hyper-scale computing developer Avalanche Computing. The deep tech firm says that at CES, it’ll demonstrate how organizations can use the tool to train AI models using multi GPUs without coding and deploy AI with a single click. Â
According to Avalanche, hAIsten AI leverages multi-GPUs to speed up AI development and shortens the AI development cycle from years to months. It will be helpful to many organizations that do not have the money to hire quality talents, such as data scientists, engineers, domain experts, and managers, to develop AI and hire engineers to deploy their AI models. The new AI tool, which will be on display at the TTA Pavilion in the Las Vegas Convention Center, supports AI model training and deployment on both cloud and edge devices and is compatible with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud as well as NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and OpenVino hardware.
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HDMI 2.1a
CES 2022 is set to play host to a new HDMI standard — the new HDMI 2.1a, whose USP is Source-Based Tone Mapping, a new HDR feature that optimizes the tones of the original content source before passing it on to displays. The automated tone mapping optimization will save users the effort of manually calibrating their displays for HDR content. While this is a great new feature for organizations that rely on high-quality HDR content for their screens, it goes without saying that the adoption of HDMI 2.1a depends on whether their existing device displays feature HDMI 2.1a ports or can be upgraded to support the new standard.
There has been a lot of chatter on tech forums and news sites on the real-world utility of the new standard, considering HDMI 2.0 isn’t that old, and there are too many HDMI standards at play at the same time which leaves end users confused. However, we’ll wait to hear from the HDMI Forum at CES on what the new standard truly brings to consumers and organizations and if it’s worth all the hype. Stay tuned.
Which announcement from CES 2022 are you most excited about? Let us know on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We would love to hear from you!