Of the scores of industries that the COVID-19 pandemic has upended, the PC industry is one of the few that looks to emerge significantly better off than it was in the "before times." Shipments of PCs are already up significantly, transformed seemingly overnight from a stagnant technology being pushed aside by smartphones to an essential tool for an era of learning and working from home. And that era looks to be long-lasting, if not permanent.
If the second personal computing revolution is going to stick, though, it needs worthy hardware. Key component manufacturers—notably, AMD, Intel, and Nvidia—have sensed this. At CES 2021 this week, they introduced dozens of new graphics processors, mobile and desktop CPUs, and other chips to boost the capabilities of PCs introduced this year.