What these laptops had in common is that they were all powered by the Intel P-series. Without getting too into the weeds here, Intel processors have, in the past, included H-series processors — powerful chips that you’ll find in gaming laptops and workstations — and U-series processors for thinner, lighter devices. (There was also a G-series, which was this whole other thing, for a couple of years.) But the Intel 12th Generation of mobile chips (that is, the batch of chips that Intel released this year) has a new letter: the P-series. The P-series is supposed to sit between the power-hungry H-series and the power-efficient U-series; the hope was that it would combine H-series power with U-series efficiency.
And then many — a great many — of this year’s top ultraportable laptops got the P-series: big-screeners like the LG Gram 17; modular devices like the Framework Laptop; business notebooks like the ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 7; premium ultraportables like the Acer Swift 5, the Lenovo Yoga 9i, the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro, and the Dell XPS 13 Plus.
The problem was that, in reality, the P-series was just a slightly less powerful H-series chip, which Intel had slapped an “ultraportable” label onto. It was identical to the H-series in core count and architecture, but it was supposed to draw slightly less power.
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