Lenovo ThinkPad X13s

A glimpse of the Arm-powered future of the PC

- JEREMY LAIRD

ONE DAY, X86 PROCESSORS in PCs will be entirely replaced by Arm chips. That’s the widespread assumption—just don’t expect us to tell you if it will actually happen or when. What we can say for sure, however, is that if future PCs do end up being Arm-powered, then the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s will retrospectively be seen as a harbinger of things to come.

This slick little 13-inch laptop rocks a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chip, a pure Arm-powered processor. If you’re not familiar with it—and why should you be?—it runs four performance-spec Arm Cortex-X1 cores and another four Cortex-A78 efficiency cores.

You also get an Adreno 690 GPU, and in this particular configuration, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. It’s all housed in a super high-quality 13-inch chassis, the form factor dictated by a 1,920 by 1,200 pixel IPS panel. It’s a super-thin design, so the ports are limited to a pair of USB-C sockets, plus headphones and a SIM slot for 5G connectivity.