Enlarge / Lenovo's ThinkPad Z13 Gen 1. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

From the basic, boring E-series to the premium X-series , Lenovo's ThinkPads rarely surprise you with their designs. By and large, they are intentionally unremarkable, with straightforward (and sometimes boxy) frames and unassuming black finishes.

So when Lenovo departs from this basic template, as it has for the new ThinkPad Z13 Gen 1 , it's worth talking about. The Z13 is recognizable as a ThinkPad, but it has eccentric flourishes like brushed gold accents and a vegan leather lid. There's also a less-flashy gray aluminum version, if a business laptop with gold accents and vegan leather feels less "stylish" and more "dad's midlife crisis" to you.

Hands-down the most impressive thing about the Z13 is its Ryzen 6000 CPU and integrated Radeon GPU. I began testing the Z13 at around the same time as I was being underwhelmed by the 12th-generation Intel processors in the Framework Laptop and Lenovo's own X1 Carbon Gen 10, and the Ryzen CPU is just better than Intel's by just about any conceivable metric. But my reaction to the laptop that has been built around this chip is more reserved.

Enlarge / AMD's Ryzen 7000 chips will be unveiled in late August. (credit: AMD)

The final phase of AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPU rollout is approaching, nearly nine months after initially teasing them at CES. The company will livestream their formal unveiling at 7 pm Eastern on Monday, August 29, alongside more details about the AM5 processor socket and 600-series chipsets. Expect to hear more specific news about performance, plus pricing and availability, for the first of what will presumably be many Zen 4-based processors.

AMD has been releasing a steady drip of details about the new CPUs since January, and various leaks and rumors have filled in some of our other knowledge gaps. Let's briefly summarize what we know (and what we think we know).

Faster CPUs, same number of cores

High-end Zen 4 chips will combine a pair of CPU chiplets with a 6 nm I/O die. This die includes PCIe 5.0 support, a DDR5 controller, and an RDNA2-based integrated GPU. (credit: AMD)

Compared to the nearly 2-year-old Ryzen 5000 processors and the Zen 3 architecture, AMD says that we can expect at least a 15 percent improvement in single-threaded performance , thanks to both clock speed increases and an 8-10 percent increase in instructions-per-clock (IPC). The company also promises performance-per-watt improvements, in part thanks to a new 5 nm manufacturing process (Zen 3 CPUs are 7 nm parts).