Intel today finally launched its "Lakefield" system on a chip (SoC) family, which features a tiny silicon footprint and opens the door for new PC designs.
Lakefield represents the company’s smallest processors with Intel Core performance to power a Windows 10 device. According to Intel, the chips will feature a package that measures approximately 12mm square. It can reduce the overall motherboard inside a laptop by up to 47 percent, versus what's required for an 8th-generation Intel Core chip.
Lakefield will first appear later this month inside Samsung’s Galaxy Book S, a 2-pound laptop that's approximately half an inch thick. So far, no pricing has been cited for that device. But for some perspective, last year's model of the Galaxy Book S went on sale starting at $999 and featured a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip.
(Credit: Samsung)
Consumers will also be able to find Lakefield silicon in Lenovo’s upcoming ThinkPad X1 Fold, billed as a foldable PC. (See our hands-on preview of the Fold at the link.) That product, pictured below, is basically a laptop/tablet hybrid with a bendable 13.3-inch OLED panel that covers one side of the device. At CES 2020, Lenovo said the product's starting price will come in at $2,500.
Foveros: Layering on the Silicon
Intel was able to minimize Lakefield’s footprint by ditching the traditional method of laying the PC's components across a circuit board. Instead, a 3D-packaging technology called Foveros can stack the components, including the DRAM, on top of each other, saving on space.
The chip-stacking approach, designed with connections through the layers, can also create a more power-efficient processor, extending a laptop’s or other device's battery life. According to Intel, a Lakefield chip can reduce a device’s standby power consumption by up to 91 percent when compared to an 8th-generation Intel processor.
The Lakefield SoCs also feature a unique five-core, five-thread setup. A single 10-nanometer (nm) “Sunny Cove” core on the chip can handle the heavy-lifting applications, while four 10nm “Tremont” cores can be leveraged for less-intensive computing tasks. In a sense, this "hybrid" approach, as Intel terms it, resembles the so-called "big.LITTLE" architectural arrangements that have been employed for some time in the high-end mobile processors used in today's flagship smartphones.
Two Flavors of Lakefield, to Start
The processors will arrive in two forms: Core i5 and Core i3. As you can see below in the table provided by Intel, the Core i5-L16G7 variant has a 1.4GHz base clock speed, which can be boosted to 1.8GHz. However, the chip’s single-core clock speed can reach a turbo-boosted speed of 3GHz, likely when the "big" Sunny Cove core kicks in for more demanding tasks.
(Credit: Intel)
Both chips require only 7 watts of power, significantly less than the 15-watt and 25-watt 10th-generation "Ice Lake" chips Intel launched last year. In addition, the Lakefield processors can also be configured to support Wi-Fi 6 and an LTE modem.
Today’s announcement from Intel may feel a bit lackluster, seeing as only two Lakefield-adopting products were name-checked. But Intel expects the Lakefield chips to unlock more innovation in the PC industry at a time when Microsoft and other vendors are working on foldable and dual-screen laptops and tablets.
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