Enlarge / Ooo, snazzy. (credit: Acer )

Acer announced Intel-powered refreshes of several product lines today at the Acer Next 2020 online event. Notable new or refreshed products include the Swift, Aspire, and Spin general-purpose laptop lines and the high-end ConceptD 7 and Porsche Design laptops.

Aspire 5, Spin 3, Spin 5

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  The Aspire 5 comes in both 14" models (shown here) and 15" models. [credit: Acer ]

The Aspire and Spin product lines get pretty straightforward refreshes with 11th-generation (Tiger Lake) Intel CPUs, but otherwise they remain largely unchanged.

For those unfamiliar with Acer branding, the Spin 3 and Spin 5 are convertible touchscreen laptops featuring a 360-degree hinge. That means they can be used as standard laptops, used in "tent mode" (unfolded 270 degrees, resting on edge of both screen and keyboard—a presentation much like a tablet in a folio stand), or opened a full 360 degrees into tablet mode.

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  One of the Summit series laptops. [credit: MSI ]

This week, PC-maker MSI held a "virtual summit" where it announced a plethora of new machines, largely driven by the launch of Intel's 11th-generation CPUs. Much of what was discussed amounts to the usual suspects—various forms and configurations of gaming laptops to compete with Razer and its ilk. But the Taiwanese tech company also introduce the Summit series: slim business laptops that are outside the recent norm for the company.

MSI's existing Prestige and Modern lines will also get a Tiger Lake refresh, with retail availability expected in October.

As a laptop vendor, MSI focuses on the higher end, both in gaming and productivity laptops. Until now, all MSI models we're aware of—including the general-purpose laptops not aimed at gamers—have featured Nvidia discrete GPUs. The Tiger Lake refresh of the productivity-oriented Modern line does away with the Nvidia GPU, relying entirely on Intel's integrated Xe graphics instead. Seeing an OEM who has been all-in on discrete GPUs suddenly drop them in existing product lines is another good indicator that Intel's Xe integrated graphics will likely live up to the hype.

Enlarge / Joe Exotic was not given a pass to attend Architecture Day 2020. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images )

This Tuesday, Intel held an all-day virtual "Architecture Day" conference and took attendees on a deep dive into the architecture of upcoming products in all categories: CPUs, GPUs (dedicated and integrated), and FPGAs. We learned a lot about what Intel's been working on and why, with the most concrete details being about the most imminent release—next month's Tiger Lake laptop processors.

Ditching the ticks, tocks, and plusses

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  "Be faster at everything, without using more power" is a pretty solid goal for a laptop CPU architecture. [credit: Intel ]

Even for a conference called "Architecture Day," Intel took us unusually deep into its manufacturing and packaging processes. The day's presentations leaned as heavily on improvements in the individual transistors and capacitors on-die as they did on improvements in the processor designs themselves.

Aside from the purely educational angle, Intel's focus on the lower levels of design appeared to serve two purposes. The lower-level focus made Intel's 10nm process sound worth the unexpectedly long wait—and it gave Intel a chance to ditch the ponderous "++" suffixes to its process size and dub the whole thing a more human-friendly "SuperFin."