Overview of the MSI Summit E13 Flip Evo laptop: a lot of kernels

The absolute productivity of Alder Lake desktop processors and their speed per watt of power consumption do not make it possible to doubt that the new Intel architecture will be even more energy efficient in mobile performance. Previously, we had seen the ultraphone based on the 12th generation processor, but the limitations of the engineering sempl prevented us from evaluating the device. The sequence of mature products has arrived: the Summit E13 Flip Evo transformer using the 12th or even 14th year version of the A12MT and all the associated technologies of the fresh intel platform, including the memory of LPDDR5, Wi-Fi 6E, as well as, of course, Thunderbolt 4.

But these are not all of the interesting features of the MSI laptop. Although the screen size of 14 inches has become a major for ultra-bugs, the Summit E13 Flip Evo has been equipped with a 13.4 inch diagonal matrix to maintain a compact shape factor, which did not prevent a large battery from being added to the device. The digital features of the laptop are a tablet mode and screen with a 120 Hz update frequency, which supports input by active stylus.

*Technical specifications, prices

The Summit E13 Flip Evo is built up by the Intel CPU of the 12th generation of category P, which by its basic characteristics are the heirs of the UP3 category from the 11th generation. And since the TDP is the same in all the relevant models as 28 W, the MSI has chosen three chips with the largest potential speed. The simple Laptop configuration contains the Core i5-1240P processor, which is the youngest representative of the group with four highly productive and eight energy-efficient x86 nuclei. The intermediate model, Core i7-1260P, is characterized by higher tactical frequencies and a reinforced configuration of Intel Xe's built-in graphics: 96 executive units instead of 80, which is important, because there is no discrete GPU in the Summit E13 Flip Evo.

Finally, the maximum configuration uses Core i7-1280P, a category P flagship. This CPU contains not four but six highly productive kernels. The cost-effective cores of all three processors are eight grand each. We wrote a separate article on Alder Lake mobile silicon in a review of one of the competing ultra-bugs, and we have a theoretical analysis of Intel ' s advanced architecture.

Together with the next generation of processors, support for new types of operational memory, either DDR5 or LPDDR5. Because the Summit E13 Flip Evo is not designed for the user's RAM upgrade, it uses the LPDDR5 memory with a capacity of 4,800 MT/s, which is a tangible step forward from the common LPDDR4X 4266 MT/s chips. The minimum system memory volume in the Summit E13 Flip Evo is 16 Gbytes, but there are also versions of the 32 Gbyte RAM laptop. The ROM is a solid storage device for 512 Gbyte or 1 Tbyte, in which case the SSD with the fourth generation PCI Express interface is used.

Summit E13 Flip Evo, like the Intel bonus laptop, uses the fastest standard of wire communication available in consumer devices, Thunderbolt 4, which also has inverse compatibility with USB4, but no one can be surprised. Another case is supporting Wi-Fi 6E wireless protocol extending the WiFi frequency range to zone 6 GHz.

Intel Core i5-1240P – 4/8 kernels/flows;

Intel Core i7-1260P – 4/8 kernels/flows;

Intel Core i7-1280P - 6/12 kernels/flow

Intel Iris Xe Graphics ;

Intel Iris Xe Graphics

2 x Thunderbolt 4;

1 × USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A;

1 × HDMI;

1 x TRS 3.5 mm;

1 x microSD

IEEE 802.11xx ;

Bluetooth 5.2

Intel Core i5-1240P – 4/8 kernels/flows;

Intel Core i7-1260P – 4/8 kernels/flows;

Intel Core i7-1280P - 6/12 kernels/flow

Intel Iris Xe Graphics ;

Intel Iris Xe Graphics

2 x Thunderbolt 4;

1 × USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A;

1 × HDMI;

1 x TRS 3.5 mm;

1 x microSD

IEEE 802.11xx ;

Bluetooth 5.2

Summit E13 Flip Evo, by all accounts, belongs to the award category of ultra-bugs, but is sold at a moderate price of $1159, a senior configuration that includes a 14-year-old Core i7-1280P processor and a terabyte SSD.

♪ External appearance and ergonomics

The chassis design at first sight releases a laptop-transformer in the Summit E13 Flip Evo. The body floors are fixed by double joints in such a way that the screen folds from the keyboard to 360° and the device becomes a tablet computer. The lid can easily be lifted with one hand.

The screen itself in the Summit E13 Flip Evo has a side ratio of 16:10, which provides more space than in the prevailing 16:9 standard, which is particularly important with a small diagonal of 13.4 inches. However, the ideal choice for such a device would be a 4:3 panel, because even now it has to make wide deviations from the top and bottom of the screen in order to maintain the acceptable dimensions of the topkeys and, as a consequence, the touchpad. Like most transformers, the Summit E13 Flip Evo screen is laminated, glossy, or better to say, very glossy. Fortunately, the huge pool of brightness compensates for the lights when operating on the light, and the large battery capacity allows the operation of this mode for quite a long time.

The main thing is that the frequency of updating the screen is 120 Hz, which, unfortunately, can still be boasted by a few business laptops. Those who use such monitors know that the way back to 60-hertz matrices is no longer available to them — even if it is not about games, but simply about work: the smoothness of what is happening is very corrupt. For the Summit E13 Flip Evo, a fast screen is particularly important because it supports the introduction using an active MPP 2.0 style. In theory, this means that any feather of the type will fit into the laptop, but it will not be necessary to buy it separately: the package already includes a branded MSI Pen.

This accessories is worth noting and in itself. The pero recognizes 4,096 pressure and inclination degrees. MSI claims that it became the first device of its kind to have a LED charge indicator. Its battery is designed for 65 hours of operation and charged through the USB Type-C connector. In addition, at the dumb end of the stylus there is a so-called Bluetooth button, which can be used to search the pages of a presentation or, for example, to launch an application. There are replacement tips: sharp, like a pencil, or rounded, like a pencil. In the walking mode, the stylus is pressed with a magnet to the side of the laptop.

Although the MSI Summit E13 Flip Evo is assembled in a body of thin metal panels, it is not the easiest of these machines, but the laptop weighs 1.35 kg. The extra mass is added mainly because of the laminated screen and the large battery. The MSI has two colour performances, white and black, with silver or bronze ends respectively.

Most of the thin ultra-bugs are not very rigid under the keyboard, and the Summit E13 Flip Evo is also. However, the flexion of the work surface and the sound of the print largely compensates for the dense internal structure. The keyboards, like most MSI laptops, have an expressed response moment, but they feel quite soft and viscous. The keyboard was able to adapt to a compact form without major victims: only the "~" key had to be cut to the width, and the Pgup and PgDn functions were combined with Home and End, the corresponding keys are above the left and right arrows.

The Summit Summit E13 Flip Evo is covered with glass, very smooth, well secured in the shell, and presses with a sure, and most important, quiet click.

The laptop has two biometric authentication tools: an infrared camera and a fingerprint scanner, but the latter, unfortunately, is not embedded in the button, but is located separately near the touchpad.

Summit E13 Flip Evo has two Thunderbolt 4 ports that are compatible with USB4 and DisplayPort, and any one of them can be used to charge the ABM. There is also one USB 3.2 Gen 1 in the Type-A Form Factor, a 3.5-mm combination audio-distribution and a full HDMI. There is also a space available for a microSD card reader, but it is not easy to use it: the machine is made as a tray that opens with a sharp clip. Another unusual feature is a mechanical web camera switch, which, in our view, is a more elegant solution than a stork.

The laptop is charged from the power grid with a standard power unit of 65 W with a small elongation.

== sync, corrected by elderman == @elder_man

The laptop cooling system operates in a standard way: cold air enters through a wide grid at the bottom, and hot air is discharged between the topkey and the screen.

The cooler itself looks quite impressive by the standards of a device whose CPU has an input power of 28 W: two heat tubes connect the heater to the radiator, which blows up the double-tangential fan. The VRM central processor is not actively cooled, but again, at this capacity, it is not necessary.

Most importantly, the Summit E13 Flip Evo has an unusually large 70 Wh battery, while most 14-inch ultra-bugs, and even some vehicles with a diagonal screen of 15 and 16 inches, cost the ABM much less.

♪ Test method

Feature Set: Supported.

Tail size: 32 x 32

Feature Set: Supported.

Tail size: 32 x 32

To ensure equal testing conditions for computers controlled by Windows 10 and Windows 11 and to demonstrate maximum performance of new machines, we are shutting down on Windows 11 of the VBS function.

The display is tested using the X-Rite i1Display Pro Plus colorometer in DisplayCAL 3.

Autonomous laptop operating time shall be measured with a brilliance of 200 cd/m2 in the following use scenarios:

• Web surfing: separate opening and closing of 3DNews.ru, Computeruniverse.ru and Unsplash.com tabs at 25 with Google Chrome browser.

♪ Test participants

The following devices participated in the test:

♪ The quality of the screen

The screen of the new Summit E13 Flip Evo cannot boast a high resolution, but has a 120 Hz update frequency, an enormous supply of luminance of 535 cd/m2 and a high IPS standard contrast of 1487:1.

The color range of the matrix fully covers the space sRGB, with good precision.

The color temperature of the screen is not overestimated relative to the 6500 K standard, as is most often the case, but is, on the contrary, lower.

The gamma correction curve appears to be oriented more towards the degree function 2.2 than the sRGB curve, but is far from perfect, resulting in a certain loss of contrast in the brightest shades.

The gray balance, on the other hand, is good for most of the luminance scale, and as a result, the screen has earned an impressive value of color accuracy from the user's criteria.

*Activity frequencies, temperature and noise level

Like most modern laptops, the Summit E13 Flip Evo can operate in three power modes. The Performance mode allows the central processor to use the entire power reserve, which in this case is 25 W, a little less than 28 W, placed on the Core i7-1280P reference specification chip. The high-performance CPU kernels are stabilized at 1.75 GHz at a long time, which is a predictable result for the processor in a compact ultrasound, which also contains eight small x86 kernels. Their tactical frequency varies about 1.45 GHz.

The built-in Intel Xe schedule operates at a frequency of 1.2 GHz, below its theoretical maximum of 1.45 GHz. And the simultaneous load on the central and graphic processor results in fast and economical x86 kernels dropping the frequency to 1.35 GHz and 1.1 GHz respectively.

For the other two energy regimes, "balanced" and "silent", they reduce the steady power of SoC to 15 or 13 W, but there is no special difference between the regimes in the tactical frequencies of x86 at the isolated load on CPU: in both cases, both types of kernels maintain a tactical frequency of about 1 GHz. Only the tactical frequencies of GPU and the speed of all components differ significantly when the CPU and GPU are loaded simultaneously, and in the latter case the "silent" regime even wins from the "balanced" mode.

Like most other compact laptops, in maximum performance mode, the Summit E13 Flip Evo allows the processor crystal to warm up to 96 °C. However, MSI's laptop does not sound as loud as many competitors, and in quiet mode, it works virtually silently.

*Synthetic productivity tests

The Silicon Alder Lake for the first time in a long time after the Intel mobile chips Comet Lake at a long multi-track load of the Cinebench test.

With regard to competing AMD solutions, we unfortunately do not yet have data on Ryzen 6,000-series laptop chips, but we can note that, again, with a long multi-track load, Core i7-1260P develops rapidity equivalent to that of the 6-nuclear Ryzen 5,000 model, with double energy consumption. The Apple M1 chip also lags behind the Intel solution, and better results than Core i7-1260P in such tasks are only capable of achieving 8-nuclear H processors from AMD with a power exceeding 50 W. Well, estimates of speed in the single-track mode of Core i7-1280P are simply not competitive.

In the computational tasks of the short, explosive nature of Alder Lake architecture, it is even better, although Apple M1's first single-activated speed is the same as Apple M1. In addition, Apple M1 outnumbers the multiple-use chip of "red" rivals in short multi-purpose tasks, but in this category Core i7-1280P results are even higher. However, it should be noted that the Geekbench test does not see any difference between the 12th and 14th nuclear models of Alder Lake, which contain 4 and 6 high-performance kernels respectively.

===Intel Xe===The integrated Intel Xe graphs are almost the same as what could have been found in the previous series of Intel CPUs, so in light graphics, the 12th and 11th generation models with the same number of GPU executive units have almost the same speed. However, the Intel Xe graphics core with the maximum configuration and so twice the results of the most powerful versions of the Radeon RX Vega built into the AMD 5000 series. Only Apple M1 have the best output of the integrated graphics in the power class up to 28 W among the solutions being compared.

♪ Production in working applications

Since the Blender creates a long multi-precision load on the central processor, the results of the test in question generally repeat the results of the synthetic berchmarks, but the distance between the CPU ' s close ones has become smaller. For example, the MSI Summit E13 Flip Evo, armed with the Core i7-1280P processor, is slightly higher than MacBook Pro ' s performance on Apple M1, but there is no way to contrast the machine with the powerful 8-nuclear CPU of AMD. The Ryzen 5,000 chip also has a modest advantage over Core i7-1280P. Another member of the 12th generation mobile chips Intel, the 12-nuclear Core i7-1260P, because of its limited capacity reserve, works on an equal basis with the open version of Core i7-1165G7, and both processors do not match the Core i7-1280P.

Despite the fact that Intel Xe has moved to the Alder Lake Crystal from Tiger Lake chips without significant changes, the new system memory type has had a beneficial effect on the performance of the integrated video core in the design tasks. With the blender project on the GPU, the Core i7-1280P processor has left both intel models of the previous generation and the AMD products of the Ryzen 5000 series. In fact, there is no special difference in this Blender test, to use CPU or Intel Xe for hosting, which, given the high productivity of the x86 silicon, Alder Lake honors the built-in Intel graph.

The Intel platform's laptops had previously held leading positions in the Lightroom tests, and thanks to Alder Lake's architecture, they had reached new heights. MSI Summit E13 Flip had outpaced all competitors, including laptops with 6- and 8-nuclear AMD H processors, and at the speed of active tasks exceeded even a powerful reference workstation. It should be noted that the variance in the speed estimates of passive tasks in this benchmarking was much smaller than in active tasks, and Core i7-1280P did not have as significant an advantage even over the 12-nuclear CPU of the same series and the dispersed model Core i7-1165G7, as in "synthetics" and Blender.

As a result, Core i7-1280P still exceeds the 8-nuclear Ryzen 75800H, but, if you look at individual test estimates, mainly because of higher filter injection speed. In addition, additional x86 kernels provide only a slight advantage over the 12-nuclear processor Core i7-1260P. What is clear is the difference in speed between Core i7-1280P and the 4-nuclear Intel CPU 11th generation. Apple M1 is also behind the Intel decision, but notice that MacBook Pro had to perform the test in x86 emulation mode.

===Care i7-1280P=======Care i7-1280P======Care i7-1280P======Cambers======Cambers=======Cambers========Care i7-1280P is the second most important type of CPU for ultra-bugs==========Care i7-1280P=======Care i7-1280P========Care i7-1280P======The CPU's high tactical frequencies in Premiere Pro appear to be as important as the architecture and number of kernels.

Except for Apple CPUs, the Intel Chip Core i7-1280P, on the same basis as the exploded Core i7-1165G7, develops the maximum range in play, sufficient to handle 4K sources in a single camera mode. However, only Apple M1 reaches a 60 FPS personnel frequency, while 30 FPS attracts even the 8-nuclear Ryzen 5000 category H with the most powerful integrated graphic configuration.

In terms of export speed, the Core i7-1280P processor has no advantage over the dispersed Core i7-1165G7, but has left far behind a 12-nuclear type of Alder Lake silicon that works with a TDP restriction of up to 20 W, as well as all "red" rivals.

* SSD performance

The solid storage device that MSI has chosen for the Summit E13 Flip Evo, the Microsoft 2450, is compatible with the fourth generation PCI Express interface, but does not actually use the tyre's extra capacity. Compared to other common solutions, this SSD develops a relatively high rate of consecutive reading rather than iron reading. Unfortunately, we have not been able to overcome these limitations.

* Autonomous working time

In the Summit E13 Flip Evo, a very large 70 Wh battery was installed for a 13-inch form-factor. When the maximum energy saving mode is activated, the laptop can continuously reproduce the video for eight hours or almost seven hours to leave the web page.

♪ Conclusions

The working laptops based on the Intel Core processors of the 12th generation are not yet much to compile a list of the best devices, but the updated version of the MSI Summit E13 Flip Evo is already giving the impression of one of the most promising laptops of the new wave. Now that we have finally been able to test Alder Lake mobile silicon with standard energy consumption, it is evident how high Intel has managed to raise the speed bar. So far we can't say anything about the competing red chips of the Ryzen 6000 family, but in comparison with the last generation of AMD, the Core i7-1280P processor with six high-performance and eight cost-effective kernels often does not subside in the Ryzen options, which consume twice as much intel 28 W.

And the Summit E13 Flip Evo has become a suitable shell for Alder Lake's advanced architecture. Even with a maximum load, the computer makes less noise than most similar machines, and can boast of an unusually large battery battery. From the priority features of the laptop, we'll mark a good keyboard, a great touchpad, and the security equipment is represented by two biometric authentication techniques and a physical switch to a webcam. The Summit E13 Flip Evo uses two of the fastest and wireless interfaces available in consumer devices: Thunderbolt 4 and WiFi 6E.

Finally, the main feature of the novel is, of course, a tablet mode and a sensitive screen supported by an active stylus, which is already available in the laptop set, while the Summit E13 Flip Evo screen has a huge amount of brightness, well calibrated, and operates with a 120 Hz update frequency, which in itself identifies the MSI device among most business laptops.