‘Lakefield’ will appear first inside Samsung’s Galaxy Book S, going on sale this month in select markets. It will also power Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Fold, a laptop with a bendable screen.
By Michael Kan
Intel has 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 Windows 10 devices. 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.
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.
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.
Originally published at https://www.pcmag.com.
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