AI Meets Ultrabook: Acer Swift Go 14 Wonders if You've Tried Turning It Off and On Again.

The Acer Swift Go 14 AI is a premium laptop by Acer using a Qualcomm Snapdragon X processor to power its bright, crystal clear LCD screen. Out of the box the laptop features a sturdy build that feels strong but light enough to carry with you and appears refined and modern in its simplicity. On initial use the touchpad and keys feel responsive and good to use but occasionally have a mushy feel around the edges of the touchpad. Additionally, the backlight is bright around the keys themselves but needs to remain on for longer. The hinge initially felt sturdy and had no wobble and after extended use remains as solid as when it was first unboxed. The laptop is fairly large compared to similar competitors, 12.7 x 9 x 0.72 inches in total, but still can fit into most backpacks and briefcases without issue. The grill present between the display and keypad is strangely sharp on the edges and could scrape skin if handled without being cautious but due to its positioning should not pose much of an issue.

The display features up to 2.5k resolution and up to 120hz refresh rate that gives accurate colour clarity and is perfect for video calls or web browsing. Blue light reduction settings are intensive and work perfectly and can be easily adjusted and set to timers to ease stress on the eyes in darker environments. The display has a matte black bezel that is thin enough to appear premium and sleek but still provides good contrast against any background you position the laptop against. 

The available ports are 2 USB-A ports on either side of the laptop, 2 USB-C which are strangely positioned on the same side and finally a headphone port for wired connections. Due to the positioning of the USB-C ports which the provided charger connects to you are somewhat limited in the angles you are able to have the laptop in whilst charging, it would have been better to have one USB-C on either side of the laptop.

The speakers are clear and loud, providing accurate enough sound for day to day use and Bluetooth connection is available as standard. The built-in camera is good enough for video calls but for professional recordings it can lack depth and the lens angle is slightly too wide.  The microphone performs moderately well, about as expected for a laptop microphone, but will be outperformed by almost all mid-range standalone USB microphones that you can purchase. The AI features mentioned later in this review can help mitigate some of these problems but are still limited by the provided hardware. The camera also functions as a biometric security feature which worked okay but felt unneeded and sometimes failed to work in lower light areas. The physical shutter provided for the camera is a nice privacy feature and something that more laptops should include.

Charging is fast and it retains charge for extended periods of use but during charging the laptop is prone to heating and can have a static feeling around the edges of the laptop. However, even after several weeks of consistent use the battery remained solid and impressive, rarely needing charging throughout the day and reaching full charge within a few hours from 20%.

The laptop comes with 1TB of storage which is more than enough for most day to day use but users working on complex projects or multiple extended tasks at once may find that they quickly run out of storage, which is non-expandable. The laptop does prompt you to use cloud features to upload your files and digitally expand your storage which is a common feature nowadays and works well on the Swift Go 14 AI as expected. The Wi-Fi 7 connectivity provided should make uploading and downloading files quick and efficient. 

The performance of the laptop is exceptional for day to day use, web browsing, watching videos and coding were easy and no performance issues came up. However, it does struggle to perform well for most graphically intensive tasks such as gaming or rendering with an unremarkable fps and often stuttering during these tasks. The Qualcomm X processor features integrated graphics therefore the laptop does not have a dedicated GPU, limiting its use for rendering and gaming. Despite this, videos were able to be watched at high resolutions with no noticeable performance drop and minimal heating issues. The Swift Go 14 AI is available with either 16GB or 32GB of RAM but even with 32GB you are limited in what you are able to do, with only 16GB the laptop will probably struggle far more than its competitors.

The CPU performs well on Geekbench 6 while only using a single core but its performance drops off for multitasking, complex tasks and, as expected, any image processing. This fails to reach the higher end of ARM based laptops but still is more than adequate for day to day usage. However, when put through these more complicated tasks the laptop produces a lot of noise and heat which can become annoying after extended use.

The AI features can be nice but often feel unnecessary for tasks other than coding suggestions and clean-up which were somewhat useful. The clean-up for video calls was also nice but as the camera is not suitable for professional recordings anyway also felt slightly unnecessary. One good use case is the noise filtering whilst traveling, it is able to completely eliminate background noise on trains or traffic, which is a nice feature but very specific. AI image generation and manipulation fell into the same category, while it was nice to have it is rare to find a use case for it, perhaps in a few years the software will catch up with the hardware and enable more interesting features.

When first using the laptop, immediate popups for Acer's control centre, McAfee and Adobe software appeared and were also advertised in the bloated taskbar, a common feature in Windows 11 computers that, while easily fixed by removing the unnecessary tabs and readouts, is annoying and makes the user experience feel cheap. During the use of the laptop, constant prompts to subscribe to McAfee for virus protection and other services came up, reducing the overall premium feeling. 

Overall this is a pretty reasonable Windows on ARM system and will work well for applications that have been ported over, but may struggle with gaming and other graphics intensive apps.

Pricing varies between about £645 and £899 (depending on the version) online.

ARM doesn't quite open source M0 processor

ARM, the company that licenses it's CPU technology, is now offering the designs of it's Cortex-M0 for 'free'.

It isn't quite free, but the IP is available to designers to integrate into their own System-on-Chip (SoC) designs pre-commercialisation, along with supporting peripherals. There's then a fast track process to license the IP when the chip goes into production.

The designs will allow prototyping the the CPU and peripherals on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) before committing to actual silicon.

ARM is also supplying access to the ARM Keil MDK (software developer kits) for 90 days so developers can test their designs.

Once a commercial license has been obtained, ARM will provide use of the ARM Cortex-M0 processor IP, SDK, and Keil MDK development tools, along with ARM technical support.

This should allow start-ups who wish to develop specific SoC solutions to utilise the ARM M0 in their designs without having to pay traditional (large) licensing fees upfront.

ARM Mali now has DRM on-chip

ARM the company that designs microprocessors and micro-controllers that are used in high-end smartphones down to dishwashers has announced a new range of graphics co-coprocessor with digital rights management (DRM) built-in.

ARM has been forging relationships with bodies to support its TrustedZone security implementations in its ARM cores, now it is extending this with DRM backed into its video processing hardware (Mali) and it has just announced the Mali-V500 which supports 1080p/60 encoding and can decode up to 120 frames per second with a resolution of 4K. This should make the chips appealing to video companies like Netflix who want modern hardware, but also want to appease Hollywood with native DRM support.

ARM have also released new CPU cores, the Cortex-A12 (mid-range smartphone, faster than current Cortex-A9 technology). ARM also boast the performance of the Cortex-A15 supersedes Intel's low power core technology, even though it's based on their new 3D transistor at 22nm.

Newer ARM chips will migrate to 20nm technologies and even 16/14nm designs and they say that will keep them ahead of Intel for the foreseeable future.

Will Amazon buy OMAP?

Texas Instruments (TI) recently announced they were 'defocusing' efforts on their OMAP line of ARM based CPUs (OMAP is their bleeding edge line of ARM based CPUs made for mobile type devices, they also have various lines of industrial ARM based CPUs, but these tend to be based on older ARM architectures). The defocusing has led to rumours that TI want to sell their OMAP devision. Both Amazon and Barnes and Noble use OMAP processors for their Kindle and Nook readers respectively. It seems Amazon has been in discussions with TI for a while and they may be a leading contender in an OMAP purchase. This would give Amazon control of their own CPUs, much like Apple has done with its Ax range of CPUs. Amazon could also use the OMAP processor in devices that may come to market such as a smartphone or other tablet. Amazon may also be in discussions with RIM to license Blackberry OS 10 and also in discussion with HP to buy or license WebOS (which HP took control of when they purchased Palm). Currently WebOS is being open sourced. Amazon have already forked Google's Android and removed all the Google sign-in functionality as well as Google's apps and they run their own Amazon app store.

Samsung demonstrates Exynos 5 processor

Samsung has announced its Exynos 5 processor based on an ARM Cortex-A15 design and has 2 cores running up to 1.7GHz using a 32nm process. The ARM Cortex-15 design can actually support up to 16 cores running at 2.5GHz, but Samsung has used a dual design to reduce power consumption for mobile applications. The Exynos 5 also has an ARM Mali T604 graphics processor with four cores supporting a resolution of 2560 x 1600 and can also support stereoscopic 3D. It also supports panel self refresh allowing for lower power as the display will only be refreshed when pixels change. The chip also supports USB 3.0 for high speed data transfers. Samsung expect the chip to be in tablets and other devices in early 2013 and is set to directly compete with Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors (which are already being fabricated using 28mm process).

ARM introduces new 32bit CPU

ARM is known for it's big processors that are licensed to all and sundry for inclusion in products like the newly announced Apple iPad3 which uses an A5X CPU (dual core CPU cores running at 1GHz with a 4 core GPU) and many other licensees including Qualcomm for their Snapdragon range etc. ARM are also big into micro controllers that sit in the myriad of deices that require some form of control (toys, white goods, dumb phones etc), these also tend to be very low power devices. ARM's latest version is the Cortex-M0+ or Flycatcher which uses 9uA/MHz on a very cheap to fabricate 90nm process (Intel's latest CPUs are all on 22nm substrates) and use around 1/3 of the power required by existing 8 and 16bit CPU architectures. The Cortex-M0+ is software backwards compatible with the older Cortex-M0 range of processors so all existing software can be used. This is a potentially huge market and Ericcson estimate that there will be 50bn units with these types of processor in them by 2020 - which will make up the internet of things. ARM will also offer low power Bluetooth and other connectivity products which can be paired with the processors.