 Storms are coming. I feel a couple drops which must mean bad news for Intel. The big thing this year at Computex is AMD. Not necessarily even the products themselves. They're important and we are going to talk about them in a moment here, but it's more about the dramatic change that's unfolding in the computer industry as we speak. So two years ago, almost to the day, AMD surprise launched their Ryzen Threadripper workstation CPU lineup. Now, Threadripper was only a niche product and one that Intel could counter by tacking overclocking features onto neutered server chips that they were already working on. But it still put Team Blue on their heels. This year, forget about heels. In 2019, AMD is putting Intel straight on their ass with direct attacks on nearly every single segment of Intel CPU business. Data center and supercomputing, mainstream consumer, and even the previously unthinkable, mobile. Zen 2 Epic and Ryzen are a really, really big deal. So that leaves us talking about the very real possibility that your next high-end computer, whether you're a sysadmin at a data center or a gamer at home, is going to be a red one. Now, I can't comment on any of the demos that took place after the keynote because I ran out immediately to film this video. But what I can do is combine my thoughts on the keynote with everything that I've learned while poking around Taipei over the last couple of days. The main news for you guys has got to be the launch of X570, AMD's new mainstream motherboard chipset that leapfrogs Intel and technology features for the first time since, I don't know, 2003, I guess. That's not normal. And neither is the amount of support that AMD is getting for it. So let's talk about that first. Without even having any performance numbers or pricing, you can usually make a pretty educated guess as to how strong a new CPU lineup is going to be simply by looking at the amount of investment that a chip maker is getting from their partners. I mean, think about it. No one is going to spend the R&D time and money that's required to create a top tier overclocking gaming motherboard for an overpriced CPU with crummy performance. And likewise, no one builds out an enormous lineup of motherboards. Asus alone announced 30, unless the CPUs that go in them are expected to sell like Bob's your uncle. So all of this stuff comes from the stage demos, which have to be taken with at least a small grain of salt until we get the products in our hands. But it looks like right now, AMD is bringing the fight to Intel in terms of not just multi-threading performance, something we've gotten used to over the last couple of years, but even single threaded and gaming performance with their top tier Ryzen 9 12 core managing a boost clock of 4.6 gigahertz with an announced 15% improvement in per clock performance over last gen. So what that means in summary is that barring something totally unforeseen within a couple of months, AMD will be matching or even measurably outperforming Intel. And I don't mean with an asterisk at a given budget. I'm talking outright. So I'm gonna let that sink in for a minute. And the good news for fans of innovation in the PC space just keeps on coming. One of the other big headlines for this launch is PCI Express Gen 4, the next iteration of the high speed interconnect that we use for everything from graphics cards to network cards to even storage these days. PCI Express Gen 4 is double the speed of its predecessor. So that means that the 40 total PCI Express lanes 20 from the chip for which link to the chip set and then 20 branching off from there can provide up to double the available bandwidth of last gen for supported devices while still maintaining support for legacy ones. And the crazy thing this caught me totally off guard is that there are going to be devices to plug into it basically right away. AMD announced their own PCI Express Gen 4 GPUs based on their new Navi architecture on stage. And then right after the keynote, my inbox lit up immediately with an announcement from Corsair for an M.2 SSD that reaches nearly five gigabit per second data transfer speeds thanks to its use of PCI Express Gen 4. Now this next gen interconnect does come with a cost. Every single X570 motherboard that we've seen, even ASUS's crosshair formula which has water cooling on board for the VRMs has a fan to actively cool the chipset heatsink. Word on the street is that the reason for that is that this chip can suck as much as 11 watts. Like think about that, that is dangerously close to the 15 watts of Intel's U series mobile CPUs. Now on the subject of pulling lots of power, the most reliable rumors indicate that in addition to the 6, 8, and 12 core products that they announced today, AMD's third gen Ryzen lineup will have 16 core products at some point which means that motherboard compatibility is going to get even more complicated than we already thought it would. Now back when Ryzen first launched, AMD committed to longer lifespans for that socket so you'd be able to take your existing AM4 motherboard and upgrade it with new CPUs for a long time. But then the thing is they went and surprised their partners by cranking up the number of cores on their CPUs in just a couple of years. So that means that the first gen boards were simply not designed to handle the power draw or in some cases even the required firmware of these new chips. So we talked to MSI and they are not supporting third gen Ryzen on first gen boards. They're advising against using second gen boards with third gen Ryzen and even on their third gen boards they're recommending using some common sense when creating your pairing. So they were only really comfortable recommending their top end boards which can comfortably deliver 300 watts or more to the CPU socket if you're going to be overclocking the upcoming 16 core. Asus by contrast was a little more bullish saying that literally everything in their lineup will handle up to a 16 core or frankly even more. They felt like they learned a big lesson last time around when AMD blindsided them with much more power hungry chips and they don't want to get put in a position where they can't support a new chip because the motherboard hardware just wasn't built for it. Honestly though that's not even Asus's biggest feature. The main benefit of their higher end boards so any of the full-sized ROG boards is apparently a new hardware tweak that they found that they promise will improve memory overclocking margins quite considerably and this could be an absolutely huge deal like a game changer for Asus because AMD processors are so dependent on memory frequency to perform their best. So I am really looking forward to testing to see if this hardware tweak actually makes a difference. Though come to think of it I'm having a hard time coming up with anything about this entire situation that I'm not looking forward to. Thing is like nothing against Intel they're a great partner and they make great products but until AMD gave them a kick in the shorts it had been a long while since they excited me as an enthusiast and as a consumer and now with this announcement they're getting a good and proper wake-up call here because this will impact their sales and their bottom line over not just the next couple of quarters but even the next couple of years. The craziest part is that up until now I've only talked about the DIY and enthusiast stuff. I haven't even touched on AMD's 64 core refresh to their epic data center platform and the stunning number of design wins that they were showing off in pre-built desktops and mobile especially gaming notebooks. Like these are big markets that make up a significant chunk of Intel's portfolio. You can tell the news is getting really bad because it's finally starting to rain. So that's where the prospect of AMD stock starts to look appealing. Now to be clear I am not your financial advisor and I'm not actually planning to buy any AMD stock because holding PC hardware stocks would be an enormous conflict of interest for me. It's just that from both the leaks and the public Intel roadmaps that I've seen I don't have any reason to believe that Intel is going to be able to regain their performance leadership position until sometime after 2020 and that's an if not a guaranteed when. Like it is looking like it's going to be a bad couple of years over at Intel headquarters. I mean honestly the only good news I can find in all of this for Intel is that if AMD has consumer chips that dramatically outperform Intel's then maybe that'll help Intel resolve all the CPU shortages that they've been going through since the demand for them will probably stop probably start to drop. So silver lining am I right? Now AMD could still let me down. They've certainly done it before and they're probably going to do it again but for better or for worse I'm on the hype train pretty hard this time so all I can do now is just hope that I don't end up eating my words because words aren't delicious. Not like private internet access. Private internet access supports a variety of VPN protocols and types of encryption and authentication allowing you to dial in exactly the level of privacy protection that you need. They've got apps for Windows, Mac OS, Android, iOS, Linux and Google Chrome and they've got over 3,000 bare metal servers in 44 locations across 28 countries. With PIA you can connect up to five devices at the same time with a single account and their apps include great features like their DNS leak protection. So go check it out. Use PIA to hide your true IP address and geographic location by heading to the link in the video description that's lmg.gg slash PIA Linus 2. So thanks for watching guys. If you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link below sometime in the next couple months. They're not out yet. Also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which I would strongly recommend joining.