Shiny laptops and superchips are coming your way, and soon

The tech year might kick off in January with CES, but it's midway through the year at Computex, Asia's biggest tech show, when we start to see the computing power that's really driving next-gen technology.

This year, when the tech world descended on Taiwan, it was all about smarter processing, new form factors for better gaming and bringing all these superior experiences to the masses for a better price.

Laptops and gaming

Before Computex had even officially started, Asus Chairman Jonney Shih, at the company's press event, was giving the crowds what they love best: shiny new laptops and a serious dose of pep (running onstage like a cheerleader -- this guy's enthusiasm is infectious).

He showed us the new ZenBook Pro (the tech world is loving that "P" word right now), new entry-level devices and the sexy ZenBook Flip S -- a convertible that's thinner and lighter than the MacBook Air. Samsung followed suit two days later with its own convertible, the Notebook 9 Pro (complete with S Pen).

Wearing a different hat, this time for Asus' gaming brand ROG, Shih unveiled the Zephyrus gaming notebook on the first day of the show. With a Nvidia GTX 1080 GPU inside, it's a "carry in one hand" laptop that pointed to one of the big trends of the show -- more grunt, without the weight (more on that below).

While Microsoft wasn't focusing heavily on its hardware (the company launched its new Surface Pro earlier in the month), it did show off a range of new partner devices. But the big focus was its full Windows ecosystem. Microsoft wants to play in the internet of things, to get Cortana into your smart home and to make sure Windows 10 is everywhere in your life.

Dell brought us two new all-in-ones, including the first to pack an octa-core processor, as well as a low-cost gaming PC born out of the company's partnership with AMD. Dell is clearly eyeing the gaming space.

Also on the gaming front, MSI was showing off serious power with the Titan GT75VR gaming laptop that can pack two GeForce 1070 GPUs and a world-first cooling system.

These brands clearly all want to up your screen time, and they're willing to offer some seriously powerful specs or lower prices to do it. 

Processing power

Chip manufacturers Intel and Nvidia aimed high with their visions for processing power.

Nvidia unveiled its Isaac Initiative, an artificial intelligence platform for training the robots of the future in a virtual environment known as a Holodeck. The robots might just be playing ice hockey right now, but expect big things. We also saw the company's Holodeck virtual reality platform with humans inside the virtual space -- it's good to know we can join the robots occasionally.

Intel laid out a vision of our AI future, pivoting away from pure discussions of chipsets to talk about the future of big data and the internet of things.

But for the PC purists, Nvidia and Intel also had plenty on offer. Nvidia talked up its new Max-Q technology, which aims to deliver maximum performance at maximum efficiency, allowing notebook manufacturers to slim down sizes (ROG's Zephyrus was the big poster child here).

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Intel unveiled its X-Series of "extreme megatasking" 18-core processors (eat your heart out, VR streaming fans and video editors) as well as its new credit card-sized portable Compute Card, which puts a PC in the palm of your hand.

AMD didn't quite make it to 18 cores, but showed off the still impressive 16-core Ryzen 9 series 1998X CPU, which will certainly give Intel a run for its money.

And… the fun stuff

It wouldn't be Asia's biggest tech show if we didn't see plenty of weird and wonderful gadgets on show. We went one-on-one with a chess-playing computer (and lost badly), practiced sign language with smart gloves that translate gestures to text, and got a sex ed class with the VaGenie -- a smart, connected Kegel exercise device.

There were the usual collections of seriously awesome peripherals, including the Flaretech Switch keyboard, an impressive HyperX lineup and the Corsair Concept Zeus mouse pad that charges your mouse between pwns.

And of course, the gaming rigs. A serious shout-out to all the case modders who turned out some of the best mods we've seen. You make the long Computex days all worthwhile.

Dive into the rest of CNET's Computex 2017 coverage here.

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