First Wave of Intel Evo laptops deliver real performance and great value

When Intel unveiled their Tiger Lake family of 11th Gen Core mobile processors back in September this year, the company launched their new Evo brand, in partnership with various laptop OEMs. Described as “co-engineered and proven designs,” Intel said Evo-branded laptops from the majors would deliver best-in-class performance and high-end experiences. “11th Gen Intel Core processors with Intel Iris Xe graphics are a major step forward in processor performance in the world and are the best laptop processors we have built,” has applied for Gregory Bryant, Executive VP and GM for Intel Client Computing Group. And without question, the Intel Gen Core 11 series processors, based on the company’s Tiger Lake CPU architecture platform, deliver a solid performance boost on all key metrics, from productivity to content creation and even a healthy chunk in gaming, thanks to Intel Xe’s new robust Iris unified graphics core. However, what personally surprised me is that, in addition to this performance boost, we are also seeing some really good price points for Intel Evo branded devices from many of the major laptop OEMs.

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Of course there are several examples of this right now, like Lenovo’s Yoga 7i. The Yoga 7i is a 14-inch 2-in-1 hybrid adjustable laptop with the company’s signature 360-degree hinge design, its standard high-end keyboard and a Dolby Atmos-capable speech system. But, under the hood, what you get for his $ 750 average price tag is where he is at. Specifically, the device is powered by an Intel quad Gen core i5-1135G7 Tiger Lake CPU, 12GB of DDR4-3200 memory and a 512GB NVMe SSM that puts up over 2GB / s of read and over 1.3GB / s of write bandwidth. Again, for the money, this type of arrangement was almost unheard of before. Not only do we have a powerful new Intel mobile platform on board, but this Evo branded device is neatly equipped elsewhere in the right places as well, and it also sports the most soil in IO and network connection, such as Thunderbolt 4 and WiFi-6. It also put up nearly 8 hours of continuous use, HD video playback in a battery life test for HotHardware in-depth drive review. Again, with its flexible 2-in-1 design, quality touch display, excellent backlit keyboard, great performance and battery life, the new Lenovo Yoga 7i is pretty much a slam-dunk, if you will for well under $ 1K for a new laptop.

Beyond Lenovo, you’ll also find several examples of similar Intel Evo-brand configurations and designs, such as Dell’s new flagship series, Inspiron 7000, HP’s X360 Pavilion, and the ASUS VivoBook S14, all of which share the same Intel 11th Gen Core line, comes with similar beefy configs and weighs in at svelte 3 pounds or less. It’s almost like Intel teamed up with these OEMs and they said, “we’ll hit sub- $ 800, midrange price point and deliver high-end ultrabook specs and experiences.”

It is not every year that we see priceless / better performance options like these on the market, thanks to new technological innovations. However, this year, the stagnant 2020 demand for new work-from-home (and gaming) devices has been met by a few key players like Intel, which has competitively leveraged its mobile CPU. I suspect that AMD will have a Zen-3 based response in the laptop market as well, in the not-so-distant future, perhaps, as we head into the CES 2021 show that now significant in the second week of January. Although, by the way, I haven’t heard many rumblings on this front. Nonetheless, this new breed of Intel Evo laptops are here and there, and they represent a great opportunity if you’re in the market for a thin and lightweight device.