Intel's new Tiger Lake processors for ultra-thin laptops are packed with new silicon building blocks for AI, graphics and other technologies to serve a "spectrum of needs" in the mobile computing space, according to top Intel engineer Boyd Phelps. In an interview with CRN, Phelps said the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company has taken a holistic and balanced approach to the engineering and design of the new processors, which are the first CPUs in the 11th-generation Intel Core family. This means that the company has devised ways, for instance, to offload certain AI workloads, like blurring the background in a Zoom video call, to new accelerators within the chip to make the workloads run faster while also saving on power. "For us, we thought about it in the context of how the different workloads have evolved and emerged. They all have kind of a different sweet spot, so for us, we geared Tiger Lake to meet that spectrum of needs," said Phelps, who is vice president of the Client Engineering Group and general manager of Client and Core Development Group at Intel.

What's the best CPU to get in your next laptop? That question became a lot harder to answer earlier this year when AMD unleashed its Ryzen 4000 mobile CPUs, finally bringing some real competition against Intel's Core product line. If that weren't enough, Intel has multiple generations of Core mobile CPU on the market, each with specific strengths and weaknesses. We're here to help you navigate this chaotic landscape, but without thousands of words and stacks of charts. We'll start with a quick primer on the strengths and weaknesses of each chip, then we'll discuss how to pick the right one for you.

"Last year we were kind of at the cusp," said Roger Chandler, vice president of Intel Architecture, graphics and software, and general manager of client XPU products and solutions. "This year we're really seeing the breakthroughs for the developers, so AI can take the edge of the technology, and the user can focus on what they want to do." Intel used Topaz Labs and its Gigapixel Upscaler app to produce the results below. The app uses AI to add detail to photos, upscaling them to higher resolutions. The next three slides focus more heavily on what you might call "pure" AI, which is much more academic.