Intel launched 11th generation Core "Tiger Lake" CPUs for laptops on Wednesday. More than 150 laptop designs are coming from Acer, Dell and others this fall.
The new laptops should help meet some of the ovewhelming demand for laptops as work from home and home education needs have grown with the pandemic.
Because of such demand, IDC this week said shipments of laptops, traditional PCs and workstations will grow 3.3% in 2020.
However, the overall category will resume its long decline in 2021, IDC said.
The personal computing devices market will grow 3.3% to 425.7 million units of laptops, PCs and workstations in 2020, but then fall by 2% annually each year, reaching 389.6 million units 2024, IDC said.
In 2021, businesses and consumers will continue to deal with economic uncertainty due to the pandemic, IDC said. The need to support learning at home caused many schools to buy as many laptops as they could. “Unfortunately, these additional purchases during 2020 means that many schools will have blown through their future budgets, which will contribute to double digit declines in the education segment during 2021 and 2022,” said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager at IDC.
Intel said its new Tiger Lake CPUs will come with Iris X graphics and will deliver 2.7 times faster content creation and 20% faster office productivity. The company also introduced an Intel Evo brand for laptop design, with 20 verified designs for later this year.
Among other features, this means the system will wake from sleep in less than 1 second and offer nine or more hours of real-world battery life with a four-hour charge in under 30 minutes on systems with FHD displays. Evo systems also support Wi-Fi 6.
IDC forecast that laptops with make up nearly half of all shipments of PC desktops, tablets and laptops in 2020, with about 198 million shipped. That number is expected to drop to nearly 194 million in 2024.
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