CES 2020 | Acer Swift 3 is now Project Athena-certified and puts buyers in an Intel vs AMD conundrum

Acer's popular ultrabook is getting the customary yearly upgrade at CES 2020. The new Swift 3 offers a choice of Intel Ice Lake and AMD Ryzen 4000 APUs in two variants, which differ primarily in screen size, Thunderbolt 3, and pricing. 

The Swift 3 SF313-52/G features a 13.5-inch 2,256 x 1,504 display with a taller 3:2 aspect ratio and weighs just 1.19 kg. The display covers 100% of the sRGB color gamut and is further enhanced by Acer's own suite of Color Intelligence and ExaColor software. The Swift 3 SF313 is powered by Intel Ice Lake processors ranging from the Core i3-1005G1 to the Core i7-1065G7 and has been co-engineered with Intel, meaning it is Project Athena-certified with a promise of quick responsiveness and long battery life. 

The Swift 3 SF314-42 sports a 14-inch 16:9 FHD display and is powered by AMD's latest 7nm Ryzen 4000 processors such as the Ryzen 7 4700U. Both the Intel and AMD Swift 3 variants have common features such as LPDDR4X RAM up to 16 GB, up to 1 TB PCIe SSD, backlit keyboard, Wi-Fi 6, Wave on Voice (WoV) function, integrated Windows Hello-compliant fingerprint reader, a similar port selection with USB Type-C, USB 3.1 Gen2, and DisplayPort ports. The Intel Swift 3's USB Type-C also offers Thunderbolt 3 capability that is not available in the AMD version. Moreover, Intel's co-engineering with Acer for Project Athena may afford the Swift 3 Intel variant a longer battery runtime of 16 hours compared to the AMD version. 

On expected lines, the Acer Swift 3 SF314-42 AMD version is priced lower than its Intel cousin. Prices for the AMD version start from US$599 and will be available in North America from May while in EMEA, the retail pricing starts from €699 with expected availability in Q1.

The Acer Swift 3 SF313-52/G Intel version starts from US$699 and is slated to be available from March. In EMEA, the laptop starts from €999 and is expected to be available from Q1.