Acer has officially announced that it’ll be launching the Tiger Lake based variants of the Swift 5 notebook in October. This announcement comes days after a Dutch retailer posted listings of the same laptop with an estimated launch of late July.
There will be two variants of the Tiger Lake based Swift 5 notebook, one powered by the Core i5-1135G7 and the other by the Core i7-1165G7. Both with feature the top-end 96EU variant of the Gen12 Xe iGPU. Considering that, it’s rather strange that there’ll be an option to opt for the GeForce MX350 for an additional $100 or so. The MX350 is barely faster than AMD’s 7nm Vega 8 graphics featured in the Renoir APUs. Going by that measure, the G7 graphics on the Tiger Lake SoCs should be faster than the former.
I reckon this is due to the fact that the iGPU will likely be power-bound. We already know that the default TDP of Tiger Lake CPUs will be 28W, rather than the traditional 15W for the U series chips. This means that the PL2 power draw will be even higher.
As such, there’s undoubtedly going to be a lot of throttling in the case of multi-threaded workloads, and the iGPU will feel the brunt of it. That might just explain the reason to opt for a dedicated GPU.
The new Tiger Lake-based Acer Swift 5 is slated for launch in October. It’ll start at a rather decent 999 USD in the US, 1099 EUR in Europe and 6999 RMB in China.
