14 PCWorld OCTOBER 2020NEWS TIGER LAKE LAPTOPS SHIPPING IN OCTOBER
benchmark claims (go.pcworld.com/inbn)
to the test, and determining whether they
should buy a notebook with an Intel 11th-gen
Core (Tiger Lake) or an AMD Ryzen Mobile
chip inside.
MSI was among the first to reflect the new
shipping date, by confirming that its Stealth
15M gaming laptop (go.pcworld.com/
m15m) will ship in October, complete with a
blazing-fast PCIe 4.0 SSD. That’s important,
because Tiger Lake is Intel’s first notebook
platform—and, in fact, the world’s first—to use
PCI Express 4.0 as part of the infrastructure.
And that’s important, because Nvidia and
Microsoft are working to eliminate SSD
compression latencies (go.pcworld.com/
cmlt) by routing them directly from the GPU
to the CPU via PCIe. (While Intel’s quite proud
of its Xe GPU
architecture inside
Tiger Lake, gaming
laptops will use
discrete graphics from
either AMD or Nvidia.)
Hand in hand with
the Tiger Lake launch,
Intel has introduced
Evo, the rebranding of
its Project Athena (go.
pcworld.com/inev)
laptop design
initiative. Many of the
new Tiger Lake laptops
will be Evo graduatesas well, including Acer’s Swift 3 and Swift 5
(go.pcworld.com/sw35) laptops—the latter,
Acer says, is the first verified member of Intel’s
Evo family. In all, twenty Evo designs are
expected by the end of the year, Intel
executives said, including the Lenovo Yoga 9i
(go.pcworld.com/yg9i), the Asus Zenbook
Flip S, and the Samsung Galaxy Book Flex
5G, among others.
In total, more than 150 designs based on
the new 11th-gen Tiger Lake Intel Core
processors are expected from partners
including Acer, Asus (which announced new
ZenBook and ExpertBook laptops [go.
pcworld.com/zbeb]), Dell, Dynabook, HP,
Lenovo, LG, MSI, Razer, Samsung, and others,
Intel said. Now, we’ll know a bit more about
when you can buy them.Asus’s new range of ZenBooks and ExpertBooks are the firm’s first to come
with Intel’s Tiger Lake chip.