CES 2019 | Dell briefly teases new XPS 13 laptop with Ice Lake at Intel keynote

The Intel keynote this year was peppered with broad strokes of information related to upcoming mobile processors including the successor to 45 W Coffee Lake-H coming in Q2/Q3 2019 and 15 W Ice Lake in Q4 2019. The latter is expected to be a more significant jump in performance and features compared to the minor differences between Kaby Lake-R and Whiskey Lake-U.

To tease Ice Lake even further, Dell President of Client Solutions Sam Burd was invited onstage to announce an Ice Lake-equipped XPS laptop scheduled for Holiday 2019. He was even carrying a prototype Ice Lake XPS unit that looked no different from the current XPS 13 or XPS 15. The fact that he never even turned on or demoed the unit, however, reveals how early in production the refresh may be at the time of writing.

Ice Lake promises a number of features not found on Whiskey Lake-U including integrated Thunderbolt 3 support, WiFi 6 (or 802.11ax) support, gen. 11 UHD Graphics, and machine-learning AI for performance optimization and faster picture recognition.

AMD is expected to launch its 7 nm Zen 2 series of SoCs sometime this year to compete against the Intel 9th gen Core series.

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