Editor’s letter

to say there’s a bumper crop of laptops from this year’s

CES ( see p26) would be an insult to the word bumper. I’m genuinely excited about what’s to come, and that’s in no small part down to magnificent work done by engineers at AMD and Intel. What a shame, then, that both firms make it so difficult for people to understand what they’re buying.

For example, make a trip to currys.co.uk. It currently offers 13 filters for laptop processors, with the Intel options ranging from a Celeron to a Core i9. Within that, you could buy a laptop toting a Pentium Silver or a Pentium Gold. While we can expect anybody to understand that Gold is superior to Silver, and a Core i9 definitely sounds better than a Core i3, this is hardly a transparent naming strategy.

Then there are the traps within. For example, we know that Intel hides the generation of Core processor in its code number, right? So, a Core i7-8565U is an eighth-generation chip, while a Core i7-1065G7 is tenth generation. (I’ll skip over what happened to the ninth generation, poor souls.)

But what, an innocent might wonder, does the U suffix mean? I won’t go through all of Intel’s variants, but U stands for “Ultra-low power”, which refers to how many watts it uses rather than how fast it makes your laptop.

The letter to be wary of is Y, because that means “extremely low power”, to the point that a Core i7 chip ending in Y is likely to be slower than a Core i5 chip ending with U.

Then there’s the G suffix. This indicates which graphics chip is included with your tenth-generation Core processor, with a G7 indicating Intel’s top of the line Iris Plus accelerator complete with 64 execution units (EUs). The more EUs you have, the faster games will run (take that, Brexiteers!). A G4 suffix means that the graphics chip includes 48 EUs but is still called Iris Plus. G1 means 32 EUs and is called UHD Graphics. Older Intel Core chips (denoted by that hidden “8” or lower) feature a completely different graphics architecture, but it’s still called UHD Graphics.

Complicated? I haven’t even got to AMD yet. Heading back to Currys, you can buy laptops with an AMD Athlon, A4, A6, A9, Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7. At least AMD has been kind enough to shadow Intel’s naming strategy with its higher-end Ryzen chips, which roughly match their Core equivalents for speed. We’ll leave the fact that AMD’s A9 chip is much slower than a Ryzen 7 for another day.

Most of the Ryzen laptops include Radeon Vega 8 graphics, which is roughly equivalent in power to Intel’s G4. That’s easy to understand. With the launch of its Ryzen 4000 series processors at CES, though, AMD is simply saying the chips include “Radeon Graphics”. It’s up to buyers to delve into the specs to check how many GPU cores are included and their frequency. For example, the Ryzen 3 4300U includes five graphics cores running at 1,400MHz; the Ryzen 5 4600U offers six cores at 1,500MHz; and the 4800H delivers seven cores at 1,600MHz.

Perhaps I’m expecting too much – after all, there’s a linear pattern here. Pay more equals faster, surely? Yes. Except when it doesn’t, because you’re buying a chip with a Y at the end, or it’s a special version of the chip designed specially for a laptop manufacturer, or it’s the second Tuesday of the month. The only good news is that it gives magazines such as ours a reason for being; as AMD and

Intel seem unwilling to make it obvious what you’re buying, we’ll do our best to make it plain.