With Computex 2015 taking place in Taipei over the course of this week, it’s expected that we’ll see a bevy of new hardware unveiled. One of the first of such announcements to come from the event has been made by Asus — rather fittingly, as the company’s headquarters is located just across the city from the expo itself.
Asus has revealed two new rigs that will take advantage of Intel’s upcoming Skylake (aka Intel Core 6th-generation) processor, according to a report from PC Perspective. We’ve known about these chips for some time, but this announcement pitches the Asus systems as among the first to utilize the hardware.
Skylake is the successor to Broadwell, which itself was only created last year. Intel’s processor releases follow the company’s ‘tick-tock model’, where Broadwell is a ‘tick’ and Skylake is a ‘tock’ — in broad strokes, this means that it shares the same fabrication process while introducing a new micro-architecture.
The first of the two systems is the G11CB, a desktop that packs a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 graphics card, M.2 SSD and DDR4 SDRAM. Its design features something that Asus describes as an “aggressively-designed chassis,” with the front of the unit featuring eye-catching LED light effects.
Meanwhile, the VivoPC VC65 is set to be positioned as the new flagship model of Asus’ VivoPC line of machines with a small form factor. The computer has enough space for two solid state or hard disk drives, making it a potent option for use as NAS or as a home media library.
Beyond system specifications, little was said about when we can expect to see the G11CB and the VC65 made available to consumers. Asus has not revealed clock speeds, core counts, integrated graphics model, or chipset names. However, given that Skylake looks set to debut in August, we might hear further word on the matter sooner rather than later.
