Intel Lakefield is........intriguing

Intel has released brand new Lakefield hybrid processors on the new Galaxy book S.  Interestingly enough these aren't your typical intel processors, let's get into it. 

  

  

Intel Lakefield processors are a new Hybrid system brought about by intel as an answer to Arm chipsets such as the Snapdragon 8cx.  Such category of chipset aimed as productivity workhorses, not for sustained workloads such as video editing.  These Chipsets aim to provide sufficient performance with superb battery life.  The 8cx has been able to most of that provided it runs Arm-native applications, but its Achilles heel has always been the lack of apps.  Intel wants to fill the hole in its lineup with Lakefield to have an alternative to ARM. Lakefield is unlike any chip intel has ever made, and what makes it unique is its hybrid cores. 

  

  

Intel is adopting the big. Little design for Lakefield to be efficient and marginally powerful when it needs it.  The current Intel® Core™ i5-L16G7 Processor is the only Lakefield device to debut in the open market so all the information I am about to supply is based on what we know about that processor and that chipset alone.  So, the Intel® Core™ i5-L16G7 Processor has 5 cores, 1 "big" core based on the Architecture used in the core i5, i7, i3, etc. The interesting part is the Tremont "little" cores, just like the 8cx these are the efficiency cores used for background functions and light tasks, made to boost battery life as far as it can at the expense of performance. Those Tremont cores are the cores that will soon be used in newer Celeron-Pentium chipsets as Tremont gears up to replace the old Gemini Lake generation. Tl;dr Lakefield has 4 cores for efficiency and 1 core for performance. 

(Image source https://www.anandtech.com)
 

Lakefield has potential because its purpose is not to be the most powerful chipset intel can put in a laptop, it's to be the most efficient platform for the laptops of the lightest weight. Yes the always connected, road-warrior style laptops and 2-in-1's such as the Galaxy book S and Surface Pro X. Qualcomm and ARM has always filled that void in the intel lineup, but Lakefield is going to change the landscape.   The main compromise with WoA is the lack of dedicated apps, forcing many to use web apps to fill in the gaps making those devices feel more like glorified Chromebooks than actual Windows laptops.  Lakefield can give those devices support to run more apps than they could on ARM, for intel this is a decisive blow to WoA.  When looking at the Benchmarks the 8cx beats Lakefield in multicore and integrated GPU (trust me intel UHD vs Adreno has Adreno Winning).  

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Lakefield also might not bring the hype with battery life either benchmarks have shown that 8cx is going neck-and-neck with Lakefield, but the Ryzen 4000 series chipset beat both which is.... wow. Maybe it was the size of the battery in both devices being pretty small compared to Ryzen device but no matter these chipsets dedicated to efficiency should be able to last longer than a high-power Ryzen any day; but they didn't and that just proves that both intel and Qualcomm has some work to do. 

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Intel Lakefield will enable some manufactures to create road warriors' workhorses with light weight and fairly good battery life but for now both sides have faults. I cannot wait to see Qualcomm's answer to Lakefield and like a Star Wars Fleet battle may the best team win.