14 PCWorld DECEMBER 2020NEWS
Intel’s Iris Xe Max brings graphics
chops to thin-and-light laptops
An 11th-gen Core Tiger Lake CPU and an Iris Xe Max GPU could be a spec to look for in future
laptops. BY MARK HACHMANI
ntel claimed recently that its new Iris Xe
Max graphics can outperform Nvidia’s
GeForce MX350 in gaming, and even
top a GeForce RTX 2080 in some
encoding tasks. How it does that—through
power sharing, and an Intel technology called
Deep Link—could make the package of an
11th-gen Core Tiger Lake CPU and an Iris Xe
Max GPU a spec to look for in future laptops.Code-named DG1, Intel’s first discrete
GPU since 1998’s Intel i740 (go.pcworld.
com/i740) will appear in mainstream thin-
and-light PCs like the Acer Swift 3x (go.
pcworld.com/sw3x), Asus VivoBook Flip
TP470, and Dell Inspiron 15 7000 2-in-1. The
Iris Xe Max faces off against Nvidia’s GeForce
MX350 and MX450 (go.pcworld.com/
mx45), both discrete mobile GPUs that splitIMAGE: INTEL