May's mighty new PC hardware: Mammoth graphics champions and freakishly specialized chips

[FANTASSY']

Quality, not quantity
May is traditionally a pretty slow month for PC hardware, and for a fine reason: Everybody in the industry saves their big guns for Computex, the Taiwan tradeshow that kicks off at the very beginning of June. While CES is all about pie-in-the-sky dream hardware, Computex keeps it real, as vendors display the new hardware they’ll be selling during the crucial holiday season.

So next month’s hardware roundup will be awesome.

But what May’s output of new PC hardware lacked in quantity, it sure made up for in quality. This month, Google teased a new type of chip that blows away Moore’s Law, Dell adorned one of the best laptops around in gold, and oh yeah—the first-ever graphics card built on 16nm technology was released, and the results of jumping forward not one but two generations in underlying hardware was nothing short of glorious.

Let’s dig in.