For years, we’ve been kicking off October’s Best Buy Guide with a brief look back at the major tech fair that takes place in September: IFA. That is slightly different this year, because the IFA has not found the usual course. However, that is not to say that no announcements have been made. Most of the laptop announcements were the result of Intel’s introduction of the Ice Lake architecture successor, called Tiger Lake.
We wrote one about Tiger Lake background article and the main improvements of the new processor are the higher clock speed for the cpu cores and the Xe gpu, which should be much faster than what we are used to from Intel’s igp’s. In addition, Intel announced its Evo certification program. You can see that as a continuation of Project Athena, but with some new requirements. For example, an eleventh generation processor, aka Tiger Lake, is required.
We find those Tiger Lake processors in Dells XPS 13 and XPS 13 2-in-1 and in a slew of new business laptops from MSI, which is best known for its gaming laptops. Also ASUS announced laptops with Tiger Lake, the most interesting of which is the Zenbook S, which can be equipped with a 13.9 “screen with 3: 2 ratio and a resolution of 3300×2200 pixels. We will undoubtedly see that panel on other laptops and is also part of an interesting trend in which manufacturers are increasingly opting for ‘higher’ laptop screens with a 16:10 or 3: 2 ratio.
Vlnr: Asus Zenbook S, Lenovo X1 Fold en MSI Summit-laptops
Lenovo also announced a laptop with a 16:10 screen, weighing less than a kilogram, the ThinkPad X1 Nano, in addition to a number of ‘normal’ Tiger Lake-laptops. Undoubtedly the most important announcement from Lenovo was the availability of the X1 Fold. It is equipped with a folding 13.3 “OLED screen, which has an aspect ratio of 4: 3. The Fold seems to be the first foldable laptop available, but with a starting price of 4049 euros, it is not for everyone.
In terms of announcements, there was a lot of attention for Intel and that was also because Nvidia and AMD showed little interest. Nvidia announced the MX450 which should be 2.5 times faster than an Intel Xe GPU in a Tiger Lake processor. The MX450 also uses the Turing architecture, which is newer than the Pascal architecture used for the MX150, 250 and 350. AMD finally announced a series of ‘new’ chips for Chromebooks. These are 12nm and 14nm processors from the Zen and Zen + generations, which have a C suffix to indicate that they are intended for Chromebooks.
So while Tiger Lake laptops dominated laptop news, it is AMD that beats the clock in this BBG. The Ryzen processors offer a lot of cores for relatively little money and that is exactly what we are looking for in the Best Buy Guides.
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