Living with the Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga X1 Gen 7 (2022)
Sometimes the changes in enterprise laptops from one year to another are huge; other times, they are relativity small. I’ve used the 2022 version of the venerable ThinkPad Yoga X1 convertible (Gen 7) for a while now. The machine looks nearly identical to last year’s model; the big changes are the move to the new Intel Core Gen 12, known as Alder Lake; and a bit of an improvement in the built-in webcam. The processor change is the most significant, but how much you’ll notice it depends on the applications you run. For some things, it's a nice but not huge update; for others, though, it's a big improvement.
The model I tested came with a Core i7-1260P processor, one of the new Intel Alder Lake family that has four "power" cores and eight "efficient" cores. It has a base power of 28 watts (although the power draw is dependent on the design of the system). The power cores still offer hyper-threading, for a total of 16 maximum threads. It has 18MB of cache and seems to have a base frequency of 2.1GHz, with turbo on the power cores going up to 4.7GHz. This is radically different from the Core i7-1185G7 in the unit I tested last year, which had four cores with 8 threads. It has vPro support, which many enterprises require. My model had 16 GB of memory along with a 512GB SSD.
The results show up with very interesting benchmark numbers. On basic benchmarks, such as PCMark 10, I saw an uninspiring 4% performance improvement. On some that are extremely multi-threaded, such as Cinebench R23, I saw a much more impressive 77% improvement.
On more real-world tests, the results were mixed but intriguing. A very large Excel model I've been using for years completed in 39 minutes, an improvement over the 43 minutes it took on last year's
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