Tech Advisor – October 2019

OCTOBER 2019 • TECH ADVISOR 69

BUYING GUIDE

offera finger-print reader integrated into the power

button as an option.

Whiskey Lake U performance

There’s one more very important thing inside the XPS

13 9380 that nerds care about: performance. It is the

first laptop we’ve reviewed with Intel’s Whiskey Lake

U Core i7-8565U. The 14nm chip is essentially an

improved version of the 14nm Kaby Lake R used in

other 8th-generation CPUs. The performance bump

mostly comes from higher clock speeds. Thanks to

whatever magic Intel has mustered, Whiskey Lake U

can run up to 500MHz faster than its predecessor. The

other change is actual hardware mitigation against the

Meltdown exploits that boiled over last year. Intel’s

previous laptop CPUs featured security updates applied

The Dell XPS 13
9380 shows just
how much smaller
you can make a
13in laptop over
a much older
and definitely
unfashionable
13in laptop with
wide bezels