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Yeah, so it looks MacBook-esque, plus the display’s aspect ratio is unconventional, and the aforementioned clever webcam is actually flawed in some respects – but these are but tiny niggles. In the big picture, the MateBook is a beautifully designed portable built around a gorgeous screen, stuffed with powerful components, yet still managing to offer superb battery life, and a relatively competitive price. All this from a firm which is known for its phones – not notebooks – making the MateBook X Pro the biggest and most pleasant surprise of 2018 for us. More of this, please, Huawei. Intel’s cannon fails to fire (again) One major drag in the past year was Intel’s announcement in April that – once again – its 10nm Cannon Lake processors were going to be delayed. Yes, these are the same CPUs which were expected to succeed Skylake (6th-generation) chips way back in 2016, and were subsequently delayed multiple times.
While Cannon Lake silicon is actually shipping in very tiny amounts, mass production is where it’s at, and this year, we discovered that won’t happen until 2019. Why? Intel simply can’t hone its 10nm manufacturing process to get yields where they need to be. This constant stalling is a rather worrying state of affairs, and indeed late this year, a rumor even floated around that Intel had cancelled Cannon Lake, forcing the company to come out and clarify that it was still making ‘good progress’ on the silicon. Although that’s obviously a relative term, given the history here. Volume production of these CPUs is expected to start in the second half of 2019, although PCs with the processors inside probably won’t be on sale until the very end of the year. Assuming all goes well, that is – but Intel can hardly afford for another round to jam in the chamber next year, as Cannon Lake being delayed until 2020 would be a major embarrassment.
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We should underline that it’s not like Intel doesn’t have any competitive CPUs right now – the firm has managed to eke a good deal of mileage out of its current manufacturing processes – but the chip giant is clearly slipping, as we’ll see with our next high point… AMD pulls off CPU coup with Ryzen 2nd-gen AMD pulled out all the silicon stops in 2018 when it came to the launch of its Ryzen 2nd-generation processors. These CPUs were regarded as nothing short of a triumph, with the beefy Ryzen 7 2700X giving Intel a serious whipping in terms of its price-to-performance ratio, and storming right to the top of our best processor chart.
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For those looking at a more palatably priced mid-range processor, the six-core Ryzen 5 2600X offers immense performance for around the £200 or $200 (about AU$280) mark. The Ryzen 3 2200G was also our pick of the budget CPU crop this year, with AMD sweeping the board in the categories where it really matters. Perhaps it’s no wonder we’ve recently seen figures suggesting that AMD is making great gains in terms of taking processor turf. Google’s AI becomes hair-raisingly honed When it emerged in May, we dubbed Google Duplex as the first real AI gamechanger. At the Google I/O developer conference, where the AI assistant was first demonstrated making a booking for a haircut on behalf of its user, jaws were on the floor.
The idea is that Google Duplex is an artificial intelligence which can make calls for you, organize your life, and deal with folks on the other end of the phone just like a real human would, holding natural conversations. This is all about convenience – booking restaurant tables for you, and the like – but it’s also Google’s big plan to enable access to information that isn’t readily available on the internet. So, for example, if a shop doesn’t list its opening hours on its website, Duplex can step in, ring the business up, and find out when it’s open for you.
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