Ground zero for Computex Taipei, Asia’s largest technology show, is the sprawling half-million square feet of Nangang Exhibition Hall.
The region’s entrepreneurial energy is on vivid display within the hall, which is partially wrapped with NVIDIA branding. Fledgling companies like DuckyChannel tout its range of keyboards tied to the Chinese zodiac. Groovy Technology Corp. draws the curious with low-cost digital signage. In a carpeted corner, Be Quiet! displays its sound-dampened desktops.
And major hometown Taiwan names from Acer to Zotac are demoing NVIDIA technology. More than a dozen companies are among them, including ASUS, Clevo, Colorful, EVGA, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Innovision, Inwin, Leadtek, MSI, Supermicro and Thermaltake, as well as Microsoft.
One of the biggest hits is the NVIDIA Pascal GPU architecture, which takes gaming and VR to a new level, with the GeForce GTX 1080. Unveiled three weeks ago to broad acclaim and just now shipping, the GTX 1080 performs 2x faster than TITAN X, with 3x its power efficiency.
It’s often getting paired up here with the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets to drive a stunning array of VR experiences.
Also lighting up the exhibition hall are new G-SYNC monitors, which deploy variable frame rates to do away with tearing and stuttering. Operating at 180Hz, the eSports monitors by Acer and ASUS set a new standard for the fastest gaming experience.
NVIDIA’s reach beyond the consumer markets is clear, with our technologies featuring in automobiles and the enterprise space.
German automaker Audi is debuting to Taiwan’s consumers its new A4 sedan, featuring a virtual dashboard powered by the NVIDIA Tegra system on a chip. It’s also giving consumers a peek at its newvirtual showroom experience. It uses VR to enable consumers to tour any Audi vehicle — from its ferocious R8 coupe to its capacious Q7 SUV — as if it’s in the room, and to see it in varying styles and colors.
MIT Lab is showing off the fruits of its collaboration with Taiwan’s Institute for Information Industry on a new type of vehicle for urban commuting. Called the Persuasive Electric Vehicle, or PEV, it looks like an electric tricycle with a protective roof. Based on NVIDIA technology, it’s expected to go on trial in Taiwan next year.
And in a sign of how Computex and Taiwan as a whole have evolved far beyond consumer electronics, Gigabyte and Supermicro are displaying systems based on the Tesla M10 GPU accelerators, which drive virtualized applications across multiple desktops.