The first day of CES 2021 set the tone with big announcements, but most companies were stingy with the details. Day two, led by big announcements from Nvidia and AMD, began to fill in the blanks with the unveiling of an affordable Nvidia graphics card for PC gamers, new AMD processors for high-performance laptops, and plus-sized TVs from TCL.
AMD is about to CRUSH Intel… Just as I predicted
The Green Team wasn’t officially part of CES 2021, as the presentation was held outside of the official virtual show, but Nvidia still had plenty to share. The biggest, and least surprising, was the launch of Nvidia’s RTX 3060, RTX 3070, and RTX 3080 Max-Q laptop graphics cards. These bring the architecture that powers Nvidia’s popular 30-series desktop cards, known as Ampere, to mobile devices.
According to Nvidia, the RTX 30-series mobile launch will include more than 70 laptops from every laptop manufacturer in North America, with availability starting on January 26 and prices starting at $999. Several specific laptops were shown off, including Lenovo's Legion Slim 7, Asus' G15 and Alienware's m15.
Amid widespread anticipation for new RTX laptops, Nvidia had a surprise in store: a new RTX 3060 desktop graphics card. At $329, it’s the most affordable RTX 30-series graphics card to date. Specs include 13 teraflops of quoted shader performance (more than an Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5) and GDDR6 memory.
