Dell's XPS 13 gets its third update in a year with Intel's Core Ultra 200V

If you need another sign that it's a very strange year for PC hardware, consider Dell's latest XPS 13 revision with Intel's just-announced Core Ultra 200V processors. It's the third time Dell has revamped its popular ultraportable over the past year. First, it got the original Core Ultra chip in April, and then in July Dell released a Snapdragon-equipped Copilot+ variant. And, as is usually the case with PC hardware, it pays to wait.

The new processors sport a 48 TOPS (tera operations per second) NPU (neural processing unit) for AI tasks, as well as dramatically faster performance and efficiency cores. Intel also claims its new Xe2 GPU, which is built into the chips, is 32 percent faster than the previous Core Ultra, 16 percent faster than AMD's HX 360 and a whopping 68 percent faster than Qualcomm's 12-core X Elite chip.

And since the Core Ultra 200V is an x86 processor, it doesn't have any of the app compatibility and performance issues i saw on the Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ XPS 13. The only major downside over the previous Intel XPS 13 is that you can't upgrade the new system's memory — Intel's Core Ultra 200V chips feature built-in RAM, which isn't upgradeable at all.

Outside of the new chip, Dell says this latest XPS 13 is the first laptop to feature a tandem OLED display, a technology which basically stacks two OLED panels atop each other for better brightness. The new XPS 13 should also be able to get up to 26 hours of battery life while streaming video on its 1080p+ screen.

You can pre-order the XPS 13 with Intel's Core Ultra 200V chips today starting at $1,400.