Our Best Intel Evo Laptops: Performance and Portability Redefined

What is the Intel Evo platform?

If you've shopped for laptops lately, you've surely seen the Intel^® Evo™ badge. It marks systems built on the new Intel Evo platform – a promise of exceptional experience, anywhere you use your laptop.

Intel and Lenovo have partnered to co-engineer an exciting lineup of premium, Evo-based laptops designed to keep up with today’s fast-paced lifestyle. The new models include some of Lenovo's thinnest, lightest, and fastest laptops, delivering verified, real-world performance with extreme processor speed, graphics performance, battery life, and more.

But what, exactly, is the Intel Evo platform? At its simplest, the Evo platform is a defined hardware environment designed to achieve impressive performance benchmarks in new, highly portable laptops. At minimum, Evo-verified systems are powered by an 11th generation Intel^® Core™ processor, powerful Intel^® Iris^® X^e or Intel^® Iris^® X^e MAX graphics, and a long list of high-end storge, networking and other components. Plus, to be Evo-verified, manufacturers must prove not only that a laptop has these parts but that it meets or exceeds strict Evo standards for responsiveness, unplugged times, and so on.

This means a laptop built on the Evo platform is more than a collection of popular features. Wherever you see the Intel Evo badge, you can count on laptop designs with purposeful technologies optimized for the experience you crave.

You see, it's how all the pieces fit together that makes Intel Evo laptops so impressive. A thin-and-light laptop is one thing. A thin, light, and powerful laptop that's built to Intel Evo standards? It's what demanding laptop shoppers have been waiting for.

Lenovo laptops with Intel Evo verification

Several Lenovo laptops have already earned the Intel^® Evo™ badge, with more on the way. Look for impressive, Evo-verified, real-world-performance laptops in each of these popular Lenovo brands:

• Business-ready ThinkPad models: The most famous name in laptop technology
• Stylish IdeaPad ultraportables: Light and powerful – with good looks, too
• Flexible Yoga 2-in-1s: The laptop that flips into tablet mode and back again
• Lightweight ThinkBooks: Highly portable laptops for business, home, and school

Evo-verified laptops will soon be everywhere. But why wait? With Lenovo, you can get yours today.

What is the Intel Evo vPro platform?

Best of all, you can get Evo-verification alongside other popular Intel solutions that IT departments have used for years. One example is the Intel^® vPro^® platform, famous for delivering business-class performance, hardware-enhanced security features, superior remote manageability, and PC fleet stability.

Now there's the Intel^® Evo™ vPro^® platform (here's Intel's description) – perfect for highly mobile business users looking for a premium, secure laptop experience. On top of all the vPro capabilities, you get stylish, thin-and-light laptops with Evo-verified features including immersive displays, amazing visuals, remarkable responsiveness, instant wake-from-sleep, and long, real-world battery life.

Are you ready for the Intel Evo and Intel Evo vPro platforms? Keep reading to learn more.

Intel Evo platform: Verified, real-world laptop performance

Some users determine the quality of a laptop based only on the specifications of the included processor, graphics, and other features. Does it have a highly rated Intel Core CPU? Are the graphics integrated or discrete? How fast is the Wi-Fi? But those who don't follow the latest trends in laptop components typically ask a different question: How will the laptop work for me?

For this latter group, Intel uses a set of real-world performance benchmarks to both verify new Intel^® Evo™ platform laptops and describe their most important user benefits. These Key Experience Indicators (KEIs), Intel says, help consumers identify the "best laptops for getting things done."¹

An Intel Evo platform laptop must deliver verified, real-world performance in each of the following KEI categories—all aimed at ensuring consistent, high-level operation in the areas Intel believes laptop users value most:

• Consistent responsiveness while on battery power²
• Fast wake-from-sleep: Under 1 second
• "Real world" battery life: 9+ hours³
• Fast charging: 4-hour charge in under 30 minutes⁴

It's easy to see why Intel Evo-verified laptops have won wide acclaim. The Evo platform KEIs aim to measure system performance in "real-world" conditions, not the perfect laboratory environments that are often used – and which actual laptop users can never hope to achieve.

Intel Evo platform components

To achieve the real-world performance it promises, the Intel^® Evo™ platform relies on a detailed set of required hardware and related components. A laptop can't earn the Evo badge unless it has at least these critical pieces:

• Processor and graphics
  • 11th generation Intel^® Core™ processor
  • Intel^® Iris^® X^e or Intel^® Iris^® X^e MAX graphics
• Additional components
  • 12" to 15" FHD touch display
  • 256 GB PCIe NVMe SSD
  • 8 GB dual-channel RAM
  • Intel^® Wi-Fi 6
  • Thunderbolt™ 4
• Related capabilities
  • Biometric login
  • USB-C charging
  • Optional Gigabit LTE connectivity

So, Intel Evo verification involves more than just top-notch processing and graphics that keep performing for long hours on battery power. Laptops with the Evo badge also sport high-resolution displays, fast solid-state storge, screaming fast connectivity and ports, and secure fingerprint- or face-recognition login capabilities. They're truly impressive systems.

More about 11th generation Intel Core mobile processors

Intel unveiled its 11th generation Intel^® Core™ laptop processors in late 2020, promising higher levels of performance and – in a major move – linking the new CPUs with the company's innovative Intel^® Iris^® X^e graphics to create the Intel^® Evo™ platform. Within weeks, laptop manufacturers, including Lenovo, released their first Intel Evo laptops to wide acclaim.

Using new SuperFin transistors, the first 11th gen Intel mobile processors delivered turbo clock speeds up to 4.80 GHz. They also included Intel^® Wi-Fi 6 (Gig +), Thunderbolt™ 4, a CPU-attached PCIe Gen4 interface, and more – all "industry-first" and/or "best-in-class" features, according to Intel.

What do you get with an 11th gen Intel Core U Series mobile processor? Performance. And speed. Just look at these Intel-provided benchmarks:

• Up to 2.7x faster content creation⁵
• More than 20% faster office productivity⁶
• More than 2x faster gaming plus streaming⁷

In addition to an 11th gen Core processor, Evo-verified laptops also need to have Intel Iris X^e graphics, which we explain in the next section.

More about Intel Iris X^e graphics

Intel^® Iris^® X^e graphics work within the company's longstanding integrated processor-graphics architecture.* But they're designed to deliver the performance of discrete or dedicated graphics chips. This makes Iris X^e graphics perfect for the thin-and-light laptops that are so popular today.

Traditionally, heavy graphics users such as video gamers and content creators have avoided the industry's most portable laptops. It's hard for manufacturers to fit all the needed features – top-flight processing and graphics, long-lasting batteries, heat sinks and cooling fans – into their smallest laptop frames. However, with Iris X^e, Intel believes it has changed this equation forever.

What makes Iris X^e graphics different? Compared to earlier Intel solutions, they've got more and faster execution units (EUs) and a much bigger L3 caches. While some AAA game titles might still be out of reach, early reviews of multiple Iris X^e-equipped laptops found them to have plenty of power to support today's most popular games – even when the graphics settings aren't at maximum.

*Shortly after introducing integrated Iris X^e graphics, Intel launched its first discrete graphics option in nearly 20 years, Intel^® Iris^® X^e MAX. The dedicated Iris X^e MAX chip works with its integrated counterpart (Intel calls them "twins") to split up and share graphics chores using new technology called Intel^® Deep Link. Depending on what the user is doing, more power is allocated either to the MAX chip (with its onboard VRAM) or to the CPU. And when graphical demands are highest, Deep Link shares those tasks between the Iris X^e MAX chip and the integrated Iris X^e graphics on the CPU.

There you have it. If you need a speedy, easily portable laptop – for work or gaming or something else – be sure to consider a Lenovo laptop with Intel Evo verification. Their technical specifications are impressive, and Intel promises they'll deliver real-world performance that's hard to beat.