AI still can’t spell in graphics…

First up, if you’re at all into the PC world, the NVIDIA keynote was the star of the show. Jensen took to the stage and announced new video cards from $549 all the way up to $1,999. The pricing may seem out of this world, but the RTX 5090 really has no competition from anyone, so NVIDIA can charge whatever they want. We’ve seen the market inflate that MSRP time and time again, so I wouldn’t be surprised if those cards end up at $3,000+ on eBay for the next few months. The RTX 5080 at $999 is actually a price cut from the previous RTX 4080 at launch, so that was a nice surprise.

What was important about this launch to me was the lack of true innovation in this batch of cards. While we don’t have any reviews by third parties yet, it appears that behind all of the DLSS smoke and mirrors, these cards will be about as efficient as the previous generation. While there are more cores and faster RAM, the power targets are also higher. I don’t see any sign of a significant improvement on the cores themselves like we’re used to seeing. We may just be hitting a wall on what we can do architecturally to improve efficiency. I’ll be really interested to see what the folks over at Puget Systems find out when these are tested with Adobe Premiere, Revit, and ArcGIS. Maybe the $549 card will perform like a $799 card from the previous generation? Maybe it won’t even be that good.

While GPUs are really interesting for gamers, of the 174 Nordic PC systems that were shipped last year, only four of them had dedicated graphics cards. The vast majority of business users don’t need a graphics card anymore. We put them in systems for architects, city planners, video editors, and CAD users, but Intel’s integrated graphics are plenty for most folks. So, what’s the news on that front?

Well, after 5 years of building bigger and hotter CPUs, Intel is finally pushing the reset button and is bringing efficiency back to the market with the Ultra 200 series processors. While their keynote didn’t have any surprises, they did officially announce the availability of the business-focused Ultra CPUs and chipsets. I’m really excited to get these in-house to start working on the next generation of Loki. For too long, we’ve struggled to keep power and heat in check with our small form factor computers. Micron also announced an entry-level PCI-Express 5.0 SSD that should deliver a good performance boost to what is still the slowest component in a PC. Expect to see new Loki builds at the start of Q2 this year.

Another very interesting thing that I saw was a demo of a business laptop collaboration between Dell, Intel, and Ventiva with the new ICE9 ionic cooling engine. While computers have fewer moving parts in them now than ever, fans are the last hold outs. And if you’ve ever had one go bad or get clogged up, you know that can turn into a costly repair with a lot of down time. A couple of companies have come up with fan-less ways to move air in a laptop, but this could be the winner. It uses a small wire that has 5,000 volts of electricity pass through it to ionize the air and move it through a conventional heatsink. It’s small, inexpensive to build, and easy to replace. While the technology is still in prototyping, it could be showing up in laptops with Intel CPUs as early as the end of the year. That would make for a very slim Surface Laptop / Pro down the road.

There is one more big hardware event for this month, and that’s a Microsoft Surface for Business event on the 30^th of January. We’ll have to wait and see what “significant updates” Microsoft has in store for us then.

That’s all for today, thanks for reading and I hope that everyone has an amazing 2025!

-Nate