The Intel P-Series Was a Step Back

An anonymous reader shares a report: I reviewed a number of laptops in 2022 across consumer, workstation, gaming, business, Chromebook, and everywhere else. I touched all of the major brands. But I had a particular focus on ultraportables this year -- that is, thin and light devices that people buy to use, say, on their couch at home -- because, with Apple's MacBooks in such a dominant position, many eyes have been on their competitors on the Windows side. For many of these models, I found myself writing the same review over and over and over. They were generally good. They performed well. But their battery life was bad. What these laptops had in common is that they were all powered by the Intel P-series. Without getting too into the weeds here, Intel processors have, in the past, included H-series processors -- powerful chips that you'll find in gaming laptops and workstations -- and U-series processors for thinner, lighter devices. (There was also a G-series, which was this whole other thing, for a couple of years.) But the Intel 12th Generation of mobile chips (that is, the batch of chips that Intel released this year) has a new letter: the P-series. The P-series is supposed to sit between the power-hungry H-series and the power-efficient U-series; the hope was that it would combine H-series power with U-series efficiency. And then many -- a great many -- of this year's top ultraportable laptops got the P-series: big-screeners like the LG Gram 17; modular devices like the Framework Laptop; business notebooks like the ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7; premium ultraportables like the Acer Swift 5, the Lenovo Yoga 9i, the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro, and the Dell XPS 13 Plus.The problem was that, in reality, the P-series was just a slightly less powerful H-series chip, which Intel had slapped an "ultraportable" label onto. It was identical to the H-series in core count and architecture, but it was supposed to draw slightly less power.

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