Australian technology news, reviews, and guides to help you
Australian technology news, reviews, and guides to help you

Intel’s laptop chip update refreshes battery, performance

New TVs, new sound gear, and what else? How about new computer chips, as Intel adds to its eighth-gen Core supply.

The next laptop you buy might have a little more oomph, WiFi improvements, and a bigger focus on battery power, if Intel gets its way.

Intel has just added a few more chip options for laptops, mostly for the super thin variations that pop up with Intel’s U and Y series processors, and the focus this year is on updated to performance and battery life, the very things you probably think your PC needs.

The updates remain as part of Intel’s eighth-gen Core family, and improve performance in two ways, helping processing power for multimedia and increasing WiFi bandwidth.

Over on the media side, Intel is talking performance capable of creating 4K content on machines that may not normally vouch for that, with newer Intel Core i-processors able to utilise as much as four cores to take content creation more mobile in form-factors that may not seem as meaty as you might expect.

Arriving in the U series of chips, the processing power has been optimised to work with better battery life, capable of hitting up to 16 hours on a single charge, all the while improving the WiFi performance, which thanks to Intel’s new Wireless AC with Gigabit WiFi can connect to modern networks for some very fast speeds.

Even the really thin and really light PCs are getting a change, arriving in the Intel Core Y series of chips, and while they lack the 4K content creation power, they still see performance increases and WiFi upgrades, complete with support for 802.11ac with Gigabit WiFi, while some will get Gigabit LTE modems for 4G mobility.

“The new 8th Gen Intel Core processors extend once again our leadership in delivering exceptional performance,” said Intel’s Chris Walker.

“Now with Gigabit Wi-Fi, we’ve enabled faster PC connectivity, added more intuitive voice experiences and enabled longer battery life needed for the next wave of mobile computing.”

You should see some of these development begin to trickle out in new computers over the coming weeks and months, and we’ll let you now when we see them start rocking up.

It may not look like much, but that’s your computer’s ability to do pretty much everything.
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