Can Lakefield Save Intel? - Samsung Galaxy Book S

 ♪ It was all a meme ♪ ♪ I used to diss Intelthrough the screen ♪ ♪ Until it started lookingreally bad for blue team ♪ - Because it is. 

Yeah, things aren't lookingsuper great for Intel right now. On desktop, they'regetting hammered by AMD. And in thin and light laptops, there's ARM to contend with. Apple will be ditching Intel for their own ARM-poweredmachines in a couple of years. And even Microsoft hasbeen flirting with ARM in the form of Qualcomm-powered devices, like the Surface Pro X and Galaxy Book S. But that's why this machineis so exciting for Intel. It's the Galaxy Book S. 

The Intel version, not the Qualcomm version. That's right, this is the first notebook on the market, powered by an Intel Core processor with Intel Hybrid Technology processor. (sighs) see, this iswhat I'm talking about. Intel just called it Lakefield. Just called it Lakefield. Anyways, Lakefield istargeting ARM head-on and it has five Cores, which is weird, but also might be awesome. Just like this segue to our sponsor. Today's video is brought to you by MSI. 

The MSI MAG CORELIQUID 360R - AIO is quiet and featuresof rotating blockhead, high thermal dissipation, radiator pump design and more. Check it out in the link below. (upbeat music) As I mentioned, thereare two Galaxy Book Ss. The first one was powered bya Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx, which is essentially a Snapdragon 855 modified for desktop use, and was announced atSamsung's 2019 Unpacked event, one year ago. Like other Windows laptops with ARM-based Qualcomm processors, the Galaxy Book S sportedsome killer features like a super thin and light body, built-in LTE connectivity, and ridiculously long battery life. 23 hours of video playback? 

Why would you even... can we settle down please? 

But it was delayed into 2020, long enough for Microsoft to release their ownARM-powered Surface Pro X featuring the Snapdragon SQ1, which is basically aneven further modified 8cx. I reviewed that device last year and the story there was similar to the onebeing told by reviewers of the first Galaxy Book S. 

It's very pretty, and can stay awake a long time, but being an ARM-powered laptop, it has a fatal flaw. It's an ARM-powered laptop. See, ARM architecture isn'tbetter than x86 architecture across the board. There are trade offs. ARM uses a much smaller instruction set, which leads to greater power efficiency, but doesn't lead to thetype of unlimited power that you can get with fullyloaded Intel or AMD processors. 

And then there's the fact that our most popular desktopoperating systems, Windows and Mac OS, are built for x86 processors. So a lot of 64-bit programsjust can't run on ARM chips. Now companies likeMicrosoft, Apple, and Adobe are trying to fix thiswith compatibility layers that allow x86 apps to run on ARM. But the experience variesfrom pretty dang good, as seen in Microsoft's Edge browser, to pretty dang sucky, as seen by anyone who triesto use Photoshop on ARM, or run Cinebench. 

As new and cool as it is, ARM just hasn't got enough sick gains to do bicep curls with the big boys. And that is where Intel may smell (sniffs) opportunity. Because this, the second Galaxy Book S, uses the exact samedesign as the first one. It's got a 13.3 inch touch display, a super thin 11 millimeter body that only weighs about two pounds. There's two USB-C ports, one on each side, plus a headphone jack, which the Surface Pro X lacked. 

Thank you, Samsung. The trackpad is as large as it can be and is generally smooth and responsive. And the keyboard is, that's not very good. It's got a mushy bottom, very little travel, and I think we got aninternational version of it because it's got some weird keys on there. Like what, what is this, what how do I, what do, what do I do with that? But the difference with thisversion of the Galaxy Book S, is that instead of anARM-powered Qualcomm processor, it's running an Intel Coreprocessor with Intel Hybrid it's it's running a Lakefield processor. 

A Core i5-L16G7. And it's the first one of its kind. Here's why that's important. Lakefield is Intel's answer to ARM. Part of the reason ARMprocessors are so power efficient is because they use what ARM calls a big.LITTLE design, in which low power coreshandle less demanding tasks with more heavy operations being handled by high power cores. Lakefield adopts this same strategy, pairing one powerful Sunny Cove Core, with four smaller Tremont Cores. 

So, can this odd number of cores, even the odds against ARM? 

Well, while this designdoes give the Intel-powered Galaxy Book S veryimpressive battery life, Samsung says it gets 17hours of video playback, it doesn't stretch thenotebook's 42-watt hour battery, as much as the Qualcommversion with 25 hours. But neither of those reflectreal world use anyways. And we ended up gettingaround 11 or 12 hours with this thing. Which is still really impressive, if not as impressive asthe sick merch you can get from lttstore.com (laughs) The other major plus for this version of the Galaxy Book S is, as I alluded to before, it's ability to run x86 apps natively. 

I actually got a Cinebenchresult for this thing. And, yeah, it's pretty lackluster, getting crushed by the HP Envy X360 that has similar battery life. But it's a result. Whereas our Surface Pro Xwouldn't even launch the app. Photoshop! I used the Galaxy Book S toedit a thumbnail in Photoshop. And while some of themore demanding functions like Content-Aware Fill chugged a bit, it was mostly fine. Just fine. And in terms of general use, I didn't really noticeanything too concerning while I was using thisthing as my work laptop. 

It's paltry eight gigs ofRAM wasn't quite enough to keep the content in all my browser tabs and messaging apps fully all the time and general system navigation was definitely slower thanmy regular work laptop with its Core i7. But unlike a Windows on ARM machine, I wasn't holding my breathevery time I launched an app. At the very least, I knew it would probably run. So, sign me up for theIntel-powered Galaxy Book S. 

Lemme just go and addit to my cart and ah! 950 bucks? 

No! Yeah, if you wanna tryone of these machines out for yourself, know that you will bestepping very clearly into the early adopter role. The Galaxy Book S very much belongs tothat category of devices that companies design, not so much to appeal tothe average Joe or Karen, but to the average Bezos or Beyonce. There's some other downsides here too. 

The Lakefield versiondoesn't come with LTE, although it can connect toslower forms of broadband. And the five-Core L16G7has less raw horsepower than the eight-Core higherclock Snapdragon 8cx. But if you've got some money to spend on a ridiculous, thin and light notebook that will run Photoshop, the Galaxy Book S is here for you. Now, it just remains to be seen whether it will pave the way for more better Lakefield devices in the future, because Intel's future may depend on it. And we depend on youchecking out our sponsor, which is, - Calling all gamers! Two of the biggest Rocket League YouTubers SunlessKhan and Musty, are racing head-to-head toreach 1 million subscribers. 

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This is,, this is is a very unusual thing today. - Thanks for watching this video, guys. Hey, if you wanna watch something else, we did a review of a muchmore powerful laptop. The Asus StudioBook One. It's kind of a completelydifferent category. 

If this is like, this is like your small and fast Ninja, that one's like you're heavy tank. Probably. I actually don't know. I don't know what laptop that is. But go check it out.