Samsung announces a new version of the Galaxy Book S laptop with Intel’s Lakefield chip inside. Could this be Intel’s answer to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx?
Samsung announced Friday what could be the most interesting laptop in some time. The latest Galaxy Book S with Intel’s new “Lakefield” hybrid chip inside will compete against Qualcomm’s battery-sipping Snapdragon 8cx chips vying for all-day battery life.
In fact, Samsung already offers a version of the Galaxy Book S with a incredible 16 hours of battery life for an even $1,000, which PCWorld reviewed in March. Unfortunately, that otherwise excellent laptop comes with the usual restrictions associated with a Snapdragon processor: slower performance when it has to emulate software, and (for now, anyways) a complete inability to run 64-bit X86 instructions.
Intel’s Lakefield should come with none of those limitations, since Intel has said that the stacked chip, which consists of a split between Intel’s “Sunny Cove” CPU architecture and its ”Tremont” Atom chips, both run natively on the X86 instruction set. Both Lakefield and the Snapdragon chips share a “big/little” architecture, however, where there are several performance cores designed to take on big, beefy workloads and several low-power cores that take over when the PC is in idle more or running simple tasks.
