Acer Swift 3, either with Core i7-1065G7 or Ryzen 7 4700U: The Laptop Market Just Blew Wide Open

Everyone wants a notebook that fulfills their needs, is super light, lasts forever, and only costs a dime. We’re not in fantasy land just quite yet, but Acer is trying with its new Swift 3 for 2020. There’s one kicker in these units though – there will be AMD and Intel variants, using the latest and greated from both – Intel’s 10nm Ice lake vs. AMD’s new 7nm APUs.

The new Acer Swift 3 ultraportable is a 14-inch unit weighing 1.2 kg (2.6 lbs) that has either up to an octo-core AMD Ryzen 7 4700U inside or up to an Intel Core i7-1065G7, 16 GB of LPDDR4X memory, and up to 512 GB of NVMe storage. Acer is going for a premium design feel here, with the lightweight chassis, narrow bezels (4.37mm), and support for features like Windows Hello and Wake on Voice supported. The full unit is 16.55mm / 0.65-inches thick.

AMD Variant

AMD Prices will start from $599 for the base configuration, and exact specifications will come closer to the launch in May. Intel will start from $699 and be available from March.

Intel Variant

If one thing is going to be clear at this year’s CES, it’s going to be that AMD and Intel are going to be hitting each other with design wins. Normally for design wins we talk about flagships, but I suspect we’ll see AMD in a lot of mid-price notebooks with good all-round specifications, which is going to be where Intel will feel the heat. Not to be outdone, Intel is expected to have a number of Ice Lake designs at CES as well – the Intel Acer Swift 3 has Athena certification for example, which might be where the extra base cost comes from, as it will likely have Thunderbolt 3, Wi-Fi 6, and an ultra-low power display. It would be interesting to square off Intel vs AMD here in a review later this year.