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New Intel chips want to make your laptop connect, work and play better
New Intel chips want to make your laptop connect, work and play better
Intel is adding six new laptop CPUs to its lineup, the company announced at this year's IFA technology trade show in Germany. Three new U-series and three new Y-series processors are joining Intel's 8th generation of Core i-series parts. Previously, these chips were known by the code names Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake.
These are for laptops, tablets and two-in-one devices that range from mainstream clamshells to thin, fanless designs, and include support for integrated gigabit Wi-Fi, which Intel says is a first for this class of consumer PC. Those system will be labeled as "Optimized for Connectivity."
Intel
The six new CPUs are in the Core-m and Core-i families and include:
1.1GHz Core m3-8100Y
1.3GHz Core i5-8200Y
1.5GHz Core i7-8500Y
2.1GHz Core i3-8145U
1.6GHz Core i5-8265U
1.8GHz Core i7-8565U
In introducing the new CPUs, Intel says that its goal was to address pain points like low-battery anxiety. By encouraging further power efficiencies, newer laptops can hit up to 16 hours of battery life. The U and Y-series chips may also provide enough of a performance boost to convince people holding into older computers to upgrade. Intel claims there are a large number of users still working on PCs more than five years old, and that the latest 8th-gen CPUs can usually double the performance of that 5-year-old system.
Intel is also focused on gaming, which is somewhat surprising, as the integrated graphics chips in Intel platforms have not kept up with PC gaming needs over the years. For most gamers, low-cost laptops and desktop with Nvidia graphics hardware for as little as $799 have filled some of that performance gap.
But Intel says it wants to support casual gaming, which the company defines as games like World of Warcraft or World of Tanks. To help buyers figure out what games they can play, and what settings to use, check out Intel's existing gameplay.intel.com website, which provides a list of compatible games, and suggested resolution and detail level settings based on your exact hardware, including updated setting for these new CPUs.
Intel
More importantly, although these new CPUs don't offer any new integrated graphics hardware, Intel says the overall efficiency of these chips, especially compared to the laptops of a few years ago, will offer smoother pen and inking performance and near-real-time 4K video rendering.
Look for laptops and tablets with these latest 8th-gen Intel CPUs to be announced at IFA and shipping soon after.
Laptops with the best battery life : See the top 25 laptops and 2-in-1 PCs with the longest battery life.
Great games for your non-gaming laptop : No GPU? No problem. The best games to sneak onto your work laptop.
Intel's Alder Lake chip could speed PCs by 30% while saving battery power
Intel's Alder Lake chip could speed PCs by 30% while saving battery power
Intel's new Alder Lake processor could boost the performance of personal computers by as much as 30% while delivering longer battery life, a breakthrough the chipmaker credits to a hybrid design that marries modules for top speed with others for efficient operation. It's an approach that's been used for years in smartphones.
At its Architecture Day event on Thursday, Intel said Alder Lake chips will come in three broad classes to power mainstream laptops, ultralight laptops and beefier desktop PCs. The three classes will be modeled on smartphone chips that combine high-performance computing cores for demanding jobs with smaller efficient cores that don't sap as much energy.
The number of performance and efficiency cores differ for each variety, but the fastest model will have eight of each. Intel's diagrams showed mobile Alder Lake chips combining six performance cores with eight efficiency cores and ultramobile chips combining two performance cores with eight efficiency cores. The Alder Lake family of chips will be available in PCs this fall.
The power and efficiency boost over today's 11th-gen Core models code-named Tiger Lake are a crucial selling point now that we have grown to expect laptops that can run for an entire day unplugged. Intel already competes with Apple and its M1 Mac processor that delivers improved power and battery life.
"We want [to] combine the best of both best of both in one system," Raja Koduri, who runs Intel's Accelerated Computing Systems & Graphics group, said in an advance briefing. Alder Lake's hybrid approach will help chart Intel's course for the next decade, Intel said.
Alder Lake's hybrid architecture is a variation of the Big.Little design that chip designer Arm rolled out a decade ago and now dominates smartphones. Apple employs the same approach with the M1 chip, which began powering Macs in 2020 and likely will be upgraded for more powerful Macs expected this year.
Alder Lake marks an important moment of unification and simplification for Intel's chip product line. Intel has been juggling a hodgepodge of new and old designs as it struggled with delays to its manufacturing process. The company fell behind its competitors as it wrangled with the problems, with AMD chip designs gaining market share, Apple ejecting Intel chips from its Macs and Asian giants Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung leapfrogging Intel in chip manufacturing.
Now all Intel's PC chips will be built with a manufacturing process called Intel 7. The same goes for Alder Lake's big sibling, Sapphire Rapids, a server chip due to arrive in the first half of 2022. Reducing the complexity should lower Intel's costs.
The chips were designed before Pat Gelsinger rejoined Intel earlier this year as chief executive. But they're an important part of his attempt to reclaim Intel's lost chipmaking leadership. He's also overseeing Intel's launch of a foundry business that builds chips for other companies, including rival Qualcomm, and hiring rival TSMC to build parts of its own chips.
"Intel is getting back to the Intel of old," said Tirias Research analyst Kevin Krewell, with the company rebuilding its past technical and operational acumen.
How much faster and more efficient will Alder Lake be?
Intel has been cagey with details but released some measurements of Alder Lake.
An average of speed tests shows Alder Lake's performance cores, known by the code name Golden Cove, demonstrates a 19% boost over today's Tiger Lake chips while running at the same clock speed, said Adi Yoaz, director of the Intel Core architecture. "This is our largest architectural shift in over a decade," he said.
Intel Alder Lake processors likely will all come with eight high-efficiency cores, shown in blue, for lower priority tasks and battery-saving operations. The number of high-performance cores, shown in purple, will range from eight on beefy desktop processors to two on ultramobile devices.
Intel
The new manufacturing process should add another 10% to 15% through hardware refinements that improve attributes like clock speed. Together, that could mean a 30% or more boost in top speeds, a big step up from past annual improvements typically less than 10%.
For preserving battery life while running a set of lower priority tasks, the Gracemont efficient core's design improves Intel's over earlier Skylake design, which is still widely used even though it's six years old. While juggling four tasks at once, efficiency cores require a fifth the power of Skylake cores, said Intel chip architect Stephen Robinson.
Using a technology called Thread Director, Alder Lake will determine whether computing jobs should be assigned to performance or efficiency cores or be shuffled around as new tasks arrive. Thread Director requires support built into Microsoft's upcoming Windows 11, but the current Windows 10 will be able to tap into some of its multicore features, said Rajshree Chabukswar, an engineer on the Alder Lake team.
Intel buying chips from rival TSMC
At Architecture Day, Intel revealed that TSMC, the foundry that builds Apple iPhone and Mac chips, will build Alchemist, the first member of Intel's new Arc family of standalone graphics chips. The chip is due early next year.
TSMC will also build Intel-designed graphics chips core to Ponte Vecchio, a massive processor package with high-speed links between many different chip elements. Ponte Vecchio will be the main brains of the Energy Department's $500 million Aurora supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory. (Slow development of the processor has delayed the arrival of that machine.)
Expect Ponte Vecchio's array of packaging technologies -- an Intel manufacturing advantage -- to trickle down to mainstream products, said Real World Technologies analyst David Kanter.
"Ponte Vecchio is the Lamborghini of the chip world. Will this become the Lexus and then become the Toyota?" he asked. "The answer is yes."
Other Alder Lake chip specs
Alder Lake processors will come in varieties consuming as little as 9 watts for ultramobile devices and 125 watts for the beefy desktops used for the most demanding tasks like gaming and video editing.
The new chip is faster thanks to a variety of improvements in how it fetches instructions to execute, caches data instructions in high-speed memory, predicts the instructions it expects to run and recovers from mistakes in those predictions.
And it gets new instructions to execute artificial intelligence tasks with a technology called Advanced Matrix Extensions. AI is an immensely important new type of computer work, and many chip designers -- including Apple, Google, Qualcomm, Samsung, Arm and many startups -- are building dedicated AI acceleration electronics into chips.
Also built into Alder Lake are controllers to handle faster new memory standards, DDR5 (Double Data Rate 5) memory and, for mobile devices, LPDDR5 (Low Power Double Data Rate 5). Faster memory helps keep the processor fed with data so it doesn't have to spend as much time idling.
For connecting to the other devices like network controllers and graphics cards, Alder Lake chips debut support for the new fifth-generation PCI Express. That can double data transfer speed compared to PCIe 4.
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Apple's custom-built M1 processor and the new MacBook Airs, MacBook Pros and Mac Minis that use it are a problem for Intel. The divorce proceedings will last about two years as the prestigious customer gradually ejects Intel's chips from its personal computers.
But Intel isn't doomed.
The Santa Clara, California, company has some advantages and options in the PC market that insulate it from Apple's threat. Other PC makers aren't going to have as easy a time as Apple in moving past Intel. Intel is still the leader in higher-end chips more powerful than the M1. And it's got enough money on hand -- $18.25 billion in cash, equivalents and investments -- to let it spend its way to a better situation.
"There isn't much near-term threat to Intel's PC business beyond losing one sizable customer," said Linley Group analyst Linley Gwennap. That doesn't mean it's going to be easy for Intel, though.
Giving Apple grounds for divorce is the latest of the chipmaker's whiffs. Earlier achievements, like charting decades of steady chip industry progress with Moore's Law, pioneering PC technology standards and powering Google's data centers, have been overshadowed by newer flubs. That includes losing its manufacturing lead and failing to tap into the smartphone market. Intel ultimately sold its cellular chip business to Apple for $1 billion.
Though Macs account for only about 8.5% of the PC market, according to IDC, Apple remains one of the biggest and most influential tech companies. Its MacBook Air models led the trend to slim but useful laptops, its MacBook Pro models remain popular with programmers and the creative set, and Apple profits from selling premium machines costing hundreds of dollars more than most Windows PCs.
Losing Apple's business will sting. New Street Research analyst Pierre Ferragu estimated in a Wednesday report that 4% to 5% of Intel's revenue comes from Apple. But it's just one of the concerns Intel will need to address.
Intel said it's "relentlessly" focused on building leading chips. "We welcome competition because it makes us better," Intel said in a statement. "We believe that there is a lot of innovation that only Intel can do," including supplying chips that span the full price range of PCs and that can run older software still common in businesses.
It's also built its first samples of the 2021 Alder Lake PC chips and expects improvements in 2022 and beyond. "We're increasingly confident in the leadership our 2023 products will deliver," the company said.
Intel faces several challenges along the way, though.
The Qualcomm worry
One of the biggest concerns tied to the arrival of Apple's M1 is that it could embolden another Intel rival, Qualcomm, which already sells mobile-based processors for PCs.
The M1 is a member of the Arm family of processors that are used in every smartphone today. Qualcomm, a leading designer of those chips for Android phone makers, is pushing more-powerful versions of its Snapdragon chips for PCs, too, and several PC makers offer Windows laptops using them.
So far, though, Arm-based Windows laptops have shown lackluster performance and remain a rarity among customers. Arm PC makers have to prove better value and performance before more people adopt the machines, said CCS Insight analyst Wayne Lam.
Apple's transition to Arm-family M1 chips is also very different from Windows PC makers using Qualcomm chips. No PC maker is dumping Intel the way Apple is, so software makers don't need to worry as much about adapting their products for the new chip architecture. Though it might be nice to have, Qualcomm PC support isn't really essential.
The AMD threat
Intel is the dominant manufacturer of chips in the x86 family, which are the kind of processors you'd find in a normal laptop. But it's not the only x86 chipmaker.
"AMD is a greater threat in the near term," said Tirias Research's Kevin Krewell, who noted that PC makers aren't going to be quick to drop the industry standard family of x86 chips.
AMD has done well with high-end desktop processors, chiefly for gamers, and is making inroads in the server market, too. It's using Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. for manufacturing, taking advantage of its miniaturization progress to cram more circuitry onto new chips. Its new Zen 3 chip design offers a substantial speed boost.
In contrast, Intel, which manufactures its own chips, has struggled. It's only now moving in earnest from an earlier manufacturing technology with 14-nanometer features to a newer 10nm process after years of delays. Even next year's Rocket Lake chip for desktop computers will still be built with the 14nm process. (A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and the smaller the measurement, the more transistors you can cram into a chip.)
AMD's Ryzen 5000 processor family, with up to 16 processing cores, challenges Intel in gaming PCs.
AMD
New manufacturing options
Intel is giving itself new options, including the ability to use other manufacturers like TSMC to build its chips. That's got risks, too, though, Gwennap said.
Moving some manufacturing to a partner makes it harder for Intel to justify the expense of trying to develop cutting-edge manufacturing, according to Gwennap. And the possibility that Intel could reclaim manufacturing once it fixes its problems could spook TSMC away from investing enough to meet Intel's massive demand.
Intel didn't comment on its manufacturing plan details. It said its integrated design and manufacturing approach helps competitiveness and in letting Intel assure customers it can supply the chips they need. "We've also been clear we will continue investing in leading process technology development," Intel said.
Apple, in contrast, has benefited from TSMC's steadily improved manufacturing. It's one reason it can fit a whopping 16 billion transistors onto its M1 chip, enough circuitry to power the main processor engines along with lots of extra abilities.
Apple's M1 starts small
Over and over during the new Mac launch event, Apple emphasized the performance per watt advantages of the M1. Translate that as being able to do useful work without draining a laptop battery fast.
Apple gets this advantage from the M1's lineage: the A series of processors that power iPhones. Smartphone chips have even stronger battery constraints than laptop chips. With the M1, a close relative of the iPhone 12's A14, Apple gets to add more transistor circuitry for more processing power and can run the chip at a higher clock speed than in phones, too.
Apple steadily increased A series chip performance for years, evolving the chip design and taking advantage of the prowess of TSMC, which manufactures the chips. Speed tests published by tech site Anandtech using the SPECint2006 benchmark show the A14 surpassing Intel's quad-core laptop chip, the 3GHz Core i7 1185G7 model that's a member of the new Tiger Lake processor family.
But the reality is that even Apple isn't ready to use the M1 in brawnier systems. The MacBook Air is all-in on M1, but Apple continues to rely on Intel for higher-powered 13-inch MacBook Pros. The 16-inch MacBook Pro, the iMac, the iMac Pro and the Mac Pro will continue to use Intel processors as Apple moves through a two-year transition to its own chips.
"It will get really interesting when Apple starts specifically optimizing its architecture for higher performance in a bigger thermal envelope and constant power for desktops," Techsponential analyst Avi Greengart said.
So yes, Intel has challenges. Apple's M1 is just the most obvious.
Intel Shows Off the Chip Tech That Will Power Your PC in 2025
Intel Shows Off the Chip Tech That Will Power Your PC in 2025
Intel on Thursday showed a silicon wafer studded with chips built with a manufacturing process that's set to arrive in 2025, a signal intended to reassure customers that the company's years of chip manufacturing difficulties are behind it.
"We remain on or ahead of schedule against the timelines that we laid out," Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger said of the company's plan to improve manufacturing processes. He showed off a gleaming wafer of memory chips built with the company's upcoming Intel 18A process, which overhauls the transistors at the heart of chip circuitry and the way power is delivered to them.
Intel is trying to dramatically accelerate manufacturing progress to meet a 2025 goal of reclaiming the chip performance lead it lost to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung. If it succeeds, it'll mean PC chips progress faster after a half decade of lackluster performance improvements. And it could mean Intel becomes more relevant to your digital life by building chips inside your car, phone and gaming PC graphics card.
At the heart of the effort is moving through five new manufacturing processes in four years: Intel 7 in 2021 with the Alder Lake chips now powering PCs, Intel 4 in 2022, Intel 3 in 2023, Intel 20A in early 2024 and Intel 18A in late 2024 -- though the lag between manufacturing availability and product delivery means 18A chips won't arrive until 2025. Showing the wafer is a "proof point" that Intel is on track, Gelsinger said.
Gelsinger, a chip engineer who returned to Intel a year ago, brings tech cred to the CEO job, but it'll be tough for the company to claw its way back. Once a chip manufacturer falls behind the leading edge, as IBM and GlobalFoundries did in recent years, it's harder to justify the colossal investments needed to advance to the new technology.
Embodying Intel's difficulty is Apple's decision to eject Intel Core processors from its Macs in favor of its own M series chips built by TSMC. At the same time, AMD has been gaining market share, Nvidia has been profiting from gaming and AI, and Amazon has introduced its own server processors.
Gelsinger spoke at Intel's investor day, where he and other executives sought to convince often skeptical analysts that the company's enormous spending on new chipmaking equipment will pay off. That will come through premium products and external customers arriving to use its new foundry manufacturing capacity.
Intel 20A introduces two major changes to chip design, RibbonFET and PowerVia, and Intel 18A refines it for better performance. RibbonFET is Intel's take on a transistor technology called gate all around, in which the gate that governs whether a transistor is on or off is wrapped entirely around ribbon-like channels that carry the electrical current.
And PowerVia delivers electrical power to the underside of the transistor, freeing the top surface for more data link circuitry. Intel is playing catch-up with RibbonFET, but it's got a lead with PowerVia, which the industry calls backside power delivery.
Intel is pressing with another lead -- packaging technology that links different "chiplets" into one more powerful processor. The Sapphire Lake member of Intel's Xeon server family arriving this year employs one packaging variety, called EMIB, while the Meteor Lake PC chip arriving in 2023 employs another, called Foveros.
Intel expects to keep up with Moore's Law, which calls for a doubling in the number of transistors per processor every two years. That'll happen through smaller transistors and new packaging techniques combining multiple "chiplets" into one processor.
Intel
Intel built its first Meteor Lake prototypes in the final quarter of 2021 with the Intel 4 process and booted them up in PCs, said Ann Kelleher, the executive vice president who leads Intel's technology development division.
"This is one of the best lead product startups we have seen in the last four generations of technology," Kelleher said. "Over its lifetime, Meteor Lake will ship hundreds of millions of units, offering the clearest demonstration of leadership packaging technologies in high volume."
Packaging will play a role in future PC processors, including Arrow Lake in 2024, which will incorporate the first chiplets built with Intel 20A. After that comes Lunar Lake, which will use Intel 18A chiplets. Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake will use a new graphics chip architecture that Intel promises will be "a huge step forward," which is important given that graphics chips these days do a lot more than paint pixels on your screen -- for example AI and video image processing.
Kelleher also detailed a host of research and manufacturing changes to prevent the catastrophic problems Intel faced in recent years. For one thing, improvements are now modular, so a problem with one needn't derail others. For another, Intel is developing contingency plans for when problems do arrive. And it's paying more attention to the advice of chip equipment suppliers like ASML.
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Nvidia's Grace AI chip leaves Intel processors behind
Nvidia's Grace AI chip leaves Intel processors behind
Nvidia has a new chip in the works for boosting artificial intelligence and other high-performance computing work: Grace, a design slated to arrive in mammoth supercomputers in 2023. Instead of accelerating conventional Intel-powered servers, though, the design includes its own built-in Arm processors.
Nvidia's current brainiest chip, the A100, is typically yoked to Intel Xeon processors. Nvidia chips do the grunt work, but Intel chips oversee it. With Grace, named after pioneering programmer Grace Hopper, the company opted to embed several Arm Neoverse processor cores within the chip to speed up processing, said Paresh Kharya, an Nvidia senior director. The chip news arrived at Nvidia's GTC 2021 conference this week.
The new chip should let AI customers run computing tasks that are vastly more complex than is possible with today's chip designs, a step toward the general artificial intelligence that is the holy grail of today's machine learning research, said Cambrian AI Researach analyst Karl Freund in a blog post.
The design illustrates Nvidia's dramatic ascent -- and Intel's struggles. Even decades of dominance in technology don't guarantee success when the rules of computing are constantly being rewritten. Your laptop likely comes with an Intel chip, but an Nvidia chip was more likely responsible for important AI work like filtering spam, improving image quality or recognizing your voice when you call your bank.
Not so many years ago, Nvidia was just a component supplier, a designer of graphics chips called GPUs to boost PC performance. Intel's family of processors, or perhaps compatible rival AMD chips, shouldered most of the computing work. Intel, though, has struggled in recent years to keep pace with chip miniaturization and to capitalize on the exploding use of AI.
The result: Nvidia's market capitalization vaulted over Intel's, reaching $357 billion compared with Intel's $278 billion. Much of the growth has been propelled by the fact that GPUs also turned out to be pretty good at AI work, specifically the computationally intense training process that builds the models that later run in data centers, PCs and phones.
Also in the ascendant is Arm, which licenses the chip designs and technology that power every smartphone, new M1-based Apple Macs and the world's fastest supercomputer. Nvidia is seeking to acquire Arm for $40 billion, a move some rivals like Qualcomm object to. Grace's integrated Arm chips let Nvidia read data from memory many times faster than with current designs, the company said.
Nvidia's Selene machine, currently the world's fifth-fastest supercomputer, pairs A100 chips with AMD Epyc CPUs. A 2023 Grace-based machine called Alps at Switzerland's National Supercomputing Center should be seven times faster, Kharya said. The Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US also will buy a Grace-powered supercomputer.
Under new Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger, Intel is working to reclaim its manufacturing lead, planning to tap into others' manufacturing abilities while it works on miniaturizing its circuitry inscribing technology.
Intel is building AI abilities into its main processors while working on dedicated hardware, too. It folded its Nervana chips operation, but its Habana AI acceleration processors are still under active development.
One hot area for AI chips is autonomous vehicles, whose self-driving algorithms rely on processing in camera imagery and other sensor data. It's a core focus for Nvidia AI chip work, for example with its Orin chip scheduled to debut in 2022 vehicles.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced new processors for AI, graphics and supercomputing at the company's GTC event.
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET
At GTC, Nvidia announced a new chip called Atlan with quadruple the performance. It should arrive in 2025 vehicles, said Danny Shapiro, Nvidia's senior director of automotive work. Like Orin and Grace, Atlan relies on Arm cores, too.
Nvidia also announced a grander autonomous vehicle technology package called Hyperion 8. It combines two Orin processors with a host of sensors: eight exterior cameras, four exterior wider-angle fisheye cameras, three interior cameras, nine radar scanners and one lidar 3D scanner. The technology should arrive later in 2021.
Nvidia extended a partnership with Volvo, the companies said. Volvo plans to use Orin chips in its next-generation vehicles.
Intel has its own autonomous vehicle division, Mobileye. Tesla develops its own AI chips for its cars.
Nvidia's Grace AI chip leaves Intel processors behind
Nvidia's Grace AI chip leaves Intel processors behind
Nvidia has a new chip in the works for boosting artificial intelligence and other high-performance computing work: Grace, a design slated to arrive in mammoth supercomputers in 2023. Instead of accelerating conventional Intel-powered servers, though, the design includes its own built-in Arm processors.
Nvidia's current brainiest chip, the A100, is typically yoked to Intel Xeon processors. Nvidia chips do the grunt work, but Intel chips oversee it. With Grace, named after pioneering programmer Grace Hopper, the company opted to embed several Arm Neoverse processor cores within the chip to speed up processing, said Paresh Kharya, an Nvidia senior director. The chip news arrived at Nvidia's GTC 2021 conference this week.
The new chip should let AI customers run computing tasks that are vastly more complex than is possible with today's chip designs, a step toward the general artificial intelligence that is the holy grail of today's machine learning research, said Cambrian AI Researach analyst Karl Freund in a blog post.
The design illustrates Nvidia's dramatic ascent -- and Intel's struggles. Even decades of dominance in technology don't guarantee success when the rules of computing are constantly being rewritten. Your laptop likely comes with an Intel chip, but an Nvidia chip was more likely responsible for important AI work like filtering spam, improving image quality or recognizing your voice when you call your bank.
Not so many years ago, Nvidia was just a component supplier, a designer of graphics chips called GPUs to boost PC performance. Intel's family of processors, or perhaps compatible rival AMD chips, shouldered most of the computing work. Intel, though, has struggled in recent years to keep pace with chip miniaturization and to capitalize on the exploding use of AI.
The result: Nvidia's market capitalization vaulted over Intel's, reaching $357 billion compared with Intel's $278 billion. Much of the growth has been propelled by the fact that GPUs also turned out to be pretty good at AI work, specifically the computationally intense training process that builds the models that later run in data centers, PCs and phones.
Also in the ascendant is Arm, which licenses the chip designs and technology that power every smartphone, new M1-based Apple Macs and the world's fastest supercomputer. Nvidia is seeking to acquire Arm for $40 billion, a move some rivals like Qualcomm object to. Grace's integrated Arm chips let Nvidia read data from memory many times faster than with current designs, the company said.
Nvidia's Selene machine, currently the world's fifth-fastest supercomputer, pairs A100 chips with AMD Epyc CPUs. A 2023 Grace-based machine called Alps at Switzerland's National Supercomputing Center should be seven times faster, Kharya said. The Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US also will buy a Grace-powered supercomputer.
Under new Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger, Intel is working to reclaim its manufacturing lead, planning to tap into others' manufacturing abilities while it works on miniaturizing its circuitry inscribing technology.
Intel is building AI abilities into its main processors while working on dedicated hardware, too. It folded its Nervana chips operation, but its Habana AI acceleration processors are still under active development.
One hot area for AI chips is autonomous vehicles, whose self-driving algorithms rely on processing in camera imagery and other sensor data. It's a core focus for Nvidia AI chip work, for example with its Orin chip scheduled to debut in 2022 vehicles.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced new processors for AI, graphics and supercomputing at the company's GTC event.
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET
At GTC, Nvidia announced a new chip called Atlan with quadruple the performance. It should arrive in 2025 vehicles, said Danny Shapiro, Nvidia's senior director of automotive work. Like Orin and Grace, Atlan relies on Arm cores, too.
Nvidia also announced a grander autonomous vehicle technology package called Hyperion 8. It combines two Orin processors with a host of sensors: eight exterior cameras, four exterior wider-angle fisheye cameras, three interior cameras, nine radar scanners and one lidar 3D scanner. The technology should arrive later in 2021.
Nvidia extended a partnership with Volvo, the companies said. Volvo plans to use Orin chips in its next-generation vehicles.
Intel has its own autonomous vehicle division, Mobileye. Tesla develops its own AI chips for its cars.
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Intel's Loihi 2 speeds effort to make neuromorphic chips like human brains
Intel's Loihi 2 speeds effort to make neuromorphic chips like human brains
Intel unveiled its Loihi 2 chip on Thursday, the second generation of a processor family that marries conventional electronics with the architecture of human brains to try to inject some new progress into the computing industry. On top of that, the chip also helps Intel advance its own manufacturing technology.
Loihi 2, an example of a technology called neuromorphic computing, is about 10 times faster than its predecessor, according to Intel. The speed improvement is the result of an eightfold increase in the number of digital neurons, a chip equivalent to human brain cells that mimic the way the brains handle information. The chip also can be programmed better to help researchers tackle more computing tasks.
The chip is built with a preproduction version of the Intel 4 manufacturing process, too, an advanced method Intel plans to use to build mainstream Intel chips arriving in 2023. The Intel 4 process can etch electronics more densely on a chip, a crucial advantage for Intel's need to pack a million digital neurons on a chip measuring 30 square millimeters.
Loihi chips are particularly good at rapidly spotting sensory input like gestures, sounds and even smells, says Mike Davies, leader of the Intel Labs group that developed Loihi. Some experiments have focused on artificial skin that could give robots a better sense of touch. "We can detect slippage if a robot hand is picking up a cup," Davies said.
Neuromorphic computing differs from artificial intelligence, a revolutionary computer technology based more loosely on how brains learn and respond, because it focuses more on the physical characteristics of human gray matter.
It differs from conventional chips in profound ways. For example, Loihi 2 stores data in tiny amounts spread across its mesh of neurons, not in a big bank of traditional computer memory, and it doesn't have a central clock ticking to synchronize computing steps on the chip.
You won't see Loihi 2 in your phone or laptop. Instead, it's geared for researchers at automakers, national labs and universities. Germany's Deutsche Bahn railway network is testing how well it can optimize train schedules. The processor is geared for tasks such as processing sound or detecting hand gestures, but with vastly lower power consumption, Davies said.
Neuromorphic computing
Low power use is a characteristic of biological gray matter, too. Human brains are made of about 80 billion cells called neurons, connected into elaborate electrical signaling networks. When enough input signals reach an individual neuron, it fires its own signal to other neurons. The topology of the connections and flow of signals lets us do everything from recognizing Abraham Lincoln to riding a bicycle. Learning is the process of establishing and reinforcing those connections.
Intel isn't the only one pursuing the idea. The Human Brain Project in Europe includes neuromorphic computing in its work. The way blood courses through the brain inspired IBM to power and cool chips with liquids in a flow battery. Samsung used IBM's neuromorphic TrueNorth chip to re-create vision.
Intel's chip is made of a million digital neurons that can be connected in any number of ways, a digital tabula rasa. Getting it to work requires configuring the proper connections between neurons. Actual processing occurs when input data reaches the chip, triggering a spike of activity that flows through the interconnected neurons and eventually produces an output. Each neuron is connected to 100 others on average, though some may reach as many as 10,000.
This flowlike design means the chip requires very little power when idle and can process data very quickly on demand, Davies said.
Programming neuromorphic chips is a big challenge, Davies said. To try to make the process easier for researchers, Intel also released an open-source software framework called Lava.
Fewer but smarter neurons
A million neurons in one chip is far from the billions in a human brain, but Intel is effectively trying to make each neuron smarter than a biological brain cell. For example, in biological brains, electrical signals are either fully on or fully off. In Loihi chips, Intel can assign a different strength to each signal, increasing processing sophistication, Davies said.
The chip can be connected to others, too, for greater scale. One improvement over the first Loihi is better networking that shortens the communication pathways that link neurons.
"The brain achieves accuracy and reliability through tremendous redundancy," Davies said. "The hope is indeed we can solve some of the same problems in a more economical way."
Intel 4 manufacturing
The Intel 4 process is a major step for Intel, its first move to a chipmaking technology called extreme ultraviolet, or EUV. Chip circuitry is etched onto silicon wafers using patterns of light, and EUV enables finer patterns for smaller structures, crucial to miniaturization and other improvements. Problems in recent years meant Intel lost its manufacturing leadership to Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), and Intel 4 is a key part of Intel's effort to reclaim that leadership by 2025.
Mainstream manufacturing with Intel 4 won't begin until the second half of 2022, with the resulting chips arriving in 2023, Intel has said. But Loihi 2 gives the company a chance to debut the technology while it's still in a preproduction phase.
"We have small quantities in the lab now," Davies said.
Intel made thousands of first generation Loihi chips, Intel said, and Loihi 2 likely will involve a similarly small production run. Manufacturing at Intel's full scale of operations, with millions of processors, brings other challenges.
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Apple's M2 MacBook Air Available for Preorder Starting July 8
Apple's M2 MacBook Air Available for Preorder Starting July 8
Apple's new MacBook Air with M2 chip will be available to order on Friday starting at 5 a.m. PT, the tech giant said on Wednesday. Orders are expected to start arriving at customers' locations on July 15.
The M2 MacBook Air, which was unveiled in June at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, features the company's next-gen Apple Silicon chip, a fanless body in four color options and a 13.6-inch Liquid Retina display.
Apple said its M2 chip brings improved speed and efficiency to the new MacBook Air. The M2 makes "intensive workloads like editing complex timelines in Final Cut Pro" nearly 40% faster than the previous generation and applying "filters and effects in apps like Adobe Photoshop" up to 20% faster, Apple said.
The M2 MacBook Air starts at $1,199 (£1,249, AU$1,899) with an eight-core CPU and eight-core GPU, 8GB of memory and a 256GB solid-state drive. There's also a $1,499 version with an eight-core CPU and 10-core GPU, 8GB of memory and a 512GB SSD.
The redesigned laptop will be available to order on Apple's website and in the Apple Store app. It's available in available in four colors: silver, space gray, starlight and midnight.
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This story is part of WWDC 2022, CNET's complete coverage from and about Apple's annual developers conference.
Apple on Monday debuted the new M2 processor, a chip that improves core processing performance 18% over the M1 without hurting battery life in the company's new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro laptops.
The 18% speed boost comes from the M2's redesigned central processing units. The processor has four fast CPU cores and four efficient cores, a hybrid approach drawn from the smartphone world. By redesigning the graphics processing units and increasing their count up to a maximum of 10 instead of eight for the M1, GPU performance is 35% faster. Overall, the new MacBook Air is 20% faster at Photoshop image editing and 38% faster at Final Cut Pro video editing, Apple said.
"We continue to have a relentless focus on power-efficient performance," Johny Srouji, Apple hardware team leader, said at the Worldwide Developers Conference.
Power efficiency is crucial to shrinking laptops since the biggest component is the battery. The new MacBook Airs take up 20% less volume but still have a long, 18-hour battery life, Apple said. The company also is using the M2 in a new 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Apple's M2 processor has large amounts of high-speed cache memory built onto the chip itself and up to 24MB of regular memory included in the chip package, two attributes that should boost performance over Apple's 2020-era M1.
Apple/Screenshots by Stephen Shankland/CNET
The M2 processor also has a significant memory boost, reaching up to 24GB instead of 16GB for the M1. Memory is important, especially as software gets bigger and laptops have years-long lifespans. M series chips build memory directly into the processor package for fast performance, but it's not upgradable.
Apple debuted the M1 at 2020's WWDC and began shipping it later that year in the earlier version of the MacBook Air. The M1, along with beefier successors called the M1 Pro, M1 Max and M1 Ultra, struck an effective balance between performance and battery life and earned strong reviews.
The M2 doubles down on the same balanced approach, offering updated processing cores that are variants of the chips at the heart of newer iPhones. The new chips continue the gradual ejection of Intel processors from the Mac family of personal computers and could enable the last Intel-powered member, the Mac Pro, to switch to Apple chips.
Designing processors is an expensive, difficult undertaking. But with the M series chips, Apple takes advantage of the A series chip design work it already does for its iPhones and iPads, then pays Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to build the chips on its advanced product lines.
The M2 is built on TSMC's 5nm (5 nanometer) manufacturing process, but it's an improved version to the one used for the M1. TSMC is working on a more advanced 3nm process that should let customers squeeze in somewhat more transistors, the core electronics elements that process data on a chip.
The M2 has 20 billion transistors, a 25% increase over the M1, Apple said.
One use of the new transistors is the increased GPU count. Another is an upgraded neural engine -- a chip block used to accelerate artificial intelligence workloads. The new 16-core neural engine can perform 15.8 trillion operations per second, Apple said, a 40% speed boost.
With its own chips, Apple gets more control over the technology foundation of its products -- a principle important to Chief Executive Tim Cook. That includes both the processor itself, with specific features like AI acceleration, video encoding, and security, and the software Apple writes to take advantage of those features.
Apple's M series and A series chips are members of the Arm processor family. UK-based Arm licenses designs that companies can customize to varying degrees. Arm chips from Qualcomm, Apple, MediaTek, Samsung, Google and others power just about every smartphone for sale.
The Apple M2 processor is significantly larger than the M1. That increases manufacturing costs. Apple raised prices for its M2-based MacBook Air laptops.
Apple/Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET
Intel has struggled over most of the last decade with problems advancing its manufacturing. That stalled its progress while Apple, Qualcomm, AMD, Nvidia and other Intel rivals took advantage of TSMC's manufacturing progress.
Because Apple doesn't offer its chips to others, and because the majority of PCs use Intel processors, Intel is somewhat insulated from Apple's shift. Intel is working to modernize its manufacturing, spending tens of billions of dollars on new chipmaking fabs. Intel aims to reclaim its lead over rivals TSMC and Samsung in 2024.
Intel's newest PC processor, code-named Alder Lake, embraces the same mix of high-performance and high-efficiency CPU cores found in smartphone chips and Apple's M series chips. Future products are designed to improve GPU performance, in particular with Intel's renewed focus on high-end graphics that's designed to wean the company from reliance on AMD and Nvidia. That's important for one big market, gaming, where PCs with Intel and AMD processors are much more widely used than Macs.
Choosing a new laptop, whether it's for work, home or going back to school, isn't an easy decision, but CNET's list of the best laptops for 2022 is a great place to start with our top picks across brands, operating systems, budgets and categories. Many of the models from 2021 have been updated for 2022 with the latest chips from Intel and AMD, and Apple's new M2 chips, too.
Our top laptop choice for most people is the updated Apple MacBook Air M2. It offers a great combination of everything we look for when we're testing: reliable everyday performance, long battery life and a design that works for a broad range of users. The latest MacBook Air starts at $1,199, which is why we still recommend the 2020 MacBook Air M1 as a lower-cost alternative to the newest Air model, as it's still an all-around excellent laptop. For those looking for a more value-oriented option, Acer's Swift 3 is our current recommendation. Well-configured older versions are available for under $550, while new models start under $800, and fully loaded with an OLED display it's right around $1,200.
At CNET, our laptop experts have collective decades of experience testing and reviewing laptops, covering everything from performance to price to battery life. This hand-curated list covers the best laptops across various sizes, styles and costs, including laptop computers running on Windows, MacOS and Chrome.
If you want more laptop brands and options for a particular category, we also have specialized lists you can look at, including the best gaming laptops, best 15-inch laptops, best two-in-ones and best Chromebooks, as well as the best laptops for college students, designers and the best MacBook Pro alternatives. If you need to stay as low as possible on the price of a new laptop computer, check out our best budget laptop and best budget gaming laptop picks.
This best laptop list is updated periodically with new models we've tested and reviewed. If you need advice on whether a particular type of laptop or two-in-one is right for you, jump to our laptop FAQ at the bottom of the list.
James Martin/CNET
Thanks to a new design, a larger display (13.6 inches versus the previous 13.3 inches), a faster M2 chip and a long-awaited upgrade to a higher-res webcam, the 2022 version of the MacBook Air remains our top choice for the most universally useful laptop in Apple's lineup, with one caveat. At $1,199, the $200 increase over the traditional $999 MacBook Air starting price is a disappointment. That's why you'll still find the M1 version of the Air retains a spot on our best laptop list. Still, we like everything else about it and is our first choice if you're considering an Air and don't mind spending more.
Read our Apple MacBook Air M2 review.
Josh Goldman/CNET
Available with either AMD Ryzen or Intel Core processors, this 14-inch laptop gives you more screen to work on than 13-inch laptops, but is still incredibly lightweight -- less than 3 pounds. The bigger display is nice, too, covering 100% sRGB color gamut (better than you typically find at its starting price under $700). It also has a backlit keyboard, a fingerprint reader and USB Type-C and HDMI ports, too. The 2022 version of the Swift 3 falls just under $1,000 with 12th-gen Intel Core i-series CPUs. But the 2021 models are still widely available for less than $600.
Sarah Tew/CNET
The Dell XPS 13 is a perennial favorite for its size, weight and performance and just overall good looks. In 2020, Dell made the laptop even smaller, while making the laptop screen larger and increasing performance for both CPU and graphics-intensive tasks. For 2022, it made the XPS 13 even smaller and lighter, kept its sub-$999 starting price the same and dropped in the latest 12th-gen Intel processors.
While we haven't had a chance to test the new model yet, we expect it to be a strong Windows alternative to the MacBook Air. Also, if you want to save money, the 2021 XPS 13 with 11th-gen Intel chips is available for less now.
This thin, 3-pound convertible is a solid choice for anyone who needs a laptop for office or schoolwork. The all-metal chassis gives it a premium look and feel, and it has a comfortable keyboard and a responsive, smooth precision touchpad. Though it's light on extra features compared to its premium linemate, the Yoga 9i, it does have one of Lenovo's sliding shutters for its webcam that gives you privacy when you want it. And it has a long battery life to boot at 12 hours, 45 minutes in our tests. The latest version with 12th-gen Intel processors starts at $999 (although you can find it on sale for less). The 2021 models are still available, too, at reduced prices.
Josh Goldman/CNET
Acer's Spin 513 is an update of sorts to one of the best Chromebooks from 2021, the Spin 713. It's a two-in-one convertible Chromebook with a 13.5-inch display that has a 3:2 aspect ratio. The extra vertical space means less scrolling when you're working. The screen size is also close to that of letter-size paper, making it comfortable for notetaking in tablet mode with a USI pen. Compared to the 713, it drops a couple of noncritical features like an HDMI output in favor of a more affordable price. It has amazing battery life, though, and a sturdy fanless design, making it silent -- perfect for quiet classrooms, meetings, lectures or video calls.
Joshua Goldman/CNET
Lenovo launched the Yoga line 10 years ago with Windows 8 and now, with Windows 11, the flexibility of the design has only gotten better. The company's flagship 14-inch Yoga 9i Gen 7 has an updated look with comfortable, rounded edges and 12th-gen Intel processors that give it a big multicore performance jump. A beautiful OLED display and improved audio make it excellent for work, video conferences and entertainment. Lenovo includes an active pen and a laptop sleeve to complete the premium package.
The powerful speakers do add some vibration to the palm rests when turned up and Lenovo has cluttered the laptop with pitches for optional services and software. But, overall, the latest Yoga 9i is the two-in-one convertible laptop to beat. Unfortunately, its availability is limited at the moment so you might have to wait to buy one.
Read our Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 7 review.
Dan Ackerman/CNET
New Apple silicon, new display, new design and all the ports we've been asking for: The latest 16-inch Apple MacBook Pro is the best Pro ever. The combination of the larger MacBook Pro's hardware and MacOS extracts the maximum performance from the components while delivering excellent battery life. The new mini-LED high-resolution display is gorgeous. And if an HDMI output and SD card reader were on your shortlist for features, you'll find those here too.
You pay for it, though: Base price for the 16-inch model of this premium laptop is $2,499.
Read our Apple MacBook Pro review.
Josh Goldman/CNET
There are plenty of 15.6-inch laptops, but 16-inch models like the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus are something of a rarity. The 16-inch display is a great size since the laptop is barely bigger than a 15.6-inch model, but you get more room for work and a roomier keyboard and touchpad along with it. For this Inspiron, Dell packed in performance parts including Nvidia discrete graphics (though it's nearly half the price if you go with Intel integrated graphics) and the display covers 100% sRGB and 81% AdobeRGB color gamuts, which is good enough if you're getting started with creating web content. Also, the laptop has a more premium fit and finish than we're used to seeing in the Inspiron line.
Read our Dell Inspiron 16 Plus review.
Dan Ackerman/CNET
Although this Microsoft Surface laptop is not the Surface Laptop, the Surface Pro continues to hit all the right notes if you're looking for a do-it-all Windows tablet that doubles as a Windows laptop. Microsoft recently overhauled it for the Surface Pro 8, which has a larger 13-inch display, 11th-gen Intel Core processors and two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports. The Surface Pro 7 is still around for the time being at a discount, and an updated version called the Surface Pro 7 Plus will stay in the lineup, so you'll still be able to get the classic Pro design but with new processors.
Read our Surface Pro 8 review.
Sarah Tew/CNET
There's a lot to love with the Razer Blade 14, which incorporates one of the fastest mobile CPUs available (for now, at least), the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX, and top-end mobile graphics with the GeForce RTX 3070 or 3080. Its display can go pixel-to-pixel with the MacBook's. And its high-quality build is up there with the best MacBooks but, like an Apple, it's not necessarily the best laptop deal, even compared to other premium laptops.
Read our Razer Blade 14 review.
HP
HP's Victus 16 is a surprisingly robust and powerful gaming laptop that keeps up with the latest games at a more affordable price. Compared to HP's high-end Omen gaming laptop line, the Victus is more of an all-purpose laptop but still configured for gaming with a price starting at less than $1,000. HP offers several configurations with graphics chip options ranging from Nvidia's entry-level GeForce GTX 1650 up to a midrange RTX 3060 or AMD Radeon RX 6500M.
Read our HP Victus 16 review.
James Martin/CNET
The XPS 17 combines the same slim, premium design of its 13-inch linemate but with increased performance possibilities. It can be configured with up to a 12th-gen Intel Core i9 processor, 64GB of memory and a 6GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 graphics chip. The best part: Dell trimmed up the chassis so much that you get a 17-inch display in a body that's the size of an older 15-inch laptop. You're getting a lot of power and a big screen in the smallest possible package.
Dell XPS 17 review.
Laptop FAQs
How much does a good laptop cost?
Setting a budget is a good place to start when shopping for the best laptop for yourself. The good news is you can get a nice-looking, lightweight laptop with excellent battery life at prices under $500. If you're shopping for a laptop around $500 or less, check out our top picks here, as well as more specific buying advice for that price range.
Higher-end components like Intel Core i-series and AMD Ryzen processors and premium design touches like thin-display bezels and aluminum or magnesium bodies have made their way to laptops priced between $500 and $1,000. You can also find touchscreens and two-in-one designs that can be used as a tablet or a laptop -- and a couple other positions in between. In this price range, you'll also find faster memory and ssd storage -- and more of it -- to improve performance.
Above $1,000 is where you'll find premium laptops and two-in-ones. If you're looking for the fastest performance, the best battery life, the slimmest, lightest designs and top-notch display quality with an adequate screen size, expect to spend at least $1,000.
Which is better, MacOS or Windows?
Deciding between MacOS and Windows laptop for many people will come down to personal preference and budget. Apple's base model laptop, the M1 MacBook Air, starts at $999. You can sometimes find it discounted or you can get educational pricing from Apple and other retailers. But, in general, it'll be at least $1,000 for a new MacBook, and the prices just go up from there.
For the money, though, you're getting great hardware top to bottom, inside and out. Apple recently moved to using its own processors, which resulted in across-the-board performance improvements compared to older Intel-based models. But, the company's most powerful laptop, the 16-inch MacBook Pro, still hasn't been updated to Apple silicon.
But, again, that great hardware comes at a price. Also, you're limited to just Apple laptops. With Windows and Chromebooks (more on these below), you get an amazing variety of devices at a wide range of prices.
Software between the two is plentiful, so unless you need to run something that's only available on one platform or the other, you should be fine to go with either. Gaming is definitely an advantage for a Windows laptop, though.
MacOS is also considered to be easier and safer to use than Windows, especially for people who want their computers to get out of the way so they can get things done. Over the years, though, Microsoft has done its best to follow suit and, with Windows 11 here, it's trying to remove any barriers. Also, while Macs might have a reputation for being safer, with the popularity of the iPhone and iPad helping to drive Mac sales, they've become bigger targets for malware.
Are Chromebooks worth it?
Yes, they are, but they're not for everyone. Google's Chrome OS has come a long way in the past 10 years and Chromebooks -- laptops that run on Chrome OS -- are great for people who do most of their work in a web browser or using mobile apps. They are secure, simple and, more often than not, a bargain. What they can't do is natively run Windows or Mac software.
What's the best laptop for home, travel or both?
The pandemic changed how and where a lot of people work. The small, ultraportable laptops valued by people who regularly traveled may have suddenly become woefully inadequate for working from home. Or maybe instead of needing long battery life, you'd rather have a bigger display with more graphics power for gaming.
If you're going to be working on a laptop and don't need more mobility than moving it from room to room, consider a 15.6-inch laptop or larger. In general, a bigger screen makes life easier for work and is more enjoyable for entertainment, and also is better if you're using it as an extended display with an external monitor. It typically means you're getting more ports, too, so connecting an external display or storage or a keyboard and mouse are easier without requiring a hub or dock.
For travel, stay with 13- or 14-inch laptops or two-in-ones. They'll be the lightest and smallest while still delivering excellent battery life. What's nice is that PC-makers are moving away from 16:9 widescreens toward 16:10- or 3:2-ratio displays, which gives you more vertical screen space for work without significantly increasing the footprint. These models usually don't have discrete graphics or powerful processors, though that's not always the case.
Which laptop is best for gaming or creating?
You can play games and create content on any laptop. That said, what games you play and what content you create -- and the speed at which you do them -- is going vary greatly depending on the components inside the laptop.
For casual browser-based games or using streaming-game services like Google Stadia, Nvidia GeForce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming, you don't need a powerful gaming laptop. And similarly, if you're just trimming video clips, cropping photos or live-streaming video from your webcam, you can get by with a modestly priced laptop or Chromebook with integrated graphics.
For anything more demanding, you'll need to invest more money for discrete graphics like Nvidia's RTX 30-series GPUs. Increased system memory of 16GB or more, having a speedy SSD for storage and a faster processor such as an Intel Core i7 or AMD Ryzen 7 will all help you get things moving faster, too.
The other piece you'll want to consider is the display. For gaming, look for screens with a high refresh rate of 120Hz or faster so games look smoother while playing. For content creation, look for displays that cover 100% sRGB color space.
How we test computers
The review process for laptops, desktops, tablets and other computer-like devices consists of two parts: performance testing under controlled conditions in the CNET Labs and extensive hands-on use by our expert reviewers. This includes evaluating a device's aesthetics, ergonomics and features. A final review verdict is a combination of both those objective and subjective judgments.
The list of benchmarking software we use changes over time as the devices we test evolve. The most important core tests we're currently running on every compatible computer include: Primate Labs Geekbench 5, Cinebench R23, PCMark 10 and 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra.
A more detailed description of each benchmark and how we use it can be found in our How We Test Computers page.
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