Intel's Lakefield Chips Are Here to Unlock New Laptop Designs, Including Foldable PCs

(Credit: Intel)

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 operation to power a Windows 10 device. According to Intel, the chips volition feature a bundle that measures approximately 12mm foursquare. Information technology tin reduce the overall motherboard inside a laptop by up to 47 percent, versus what's required for an 8th-generation Intel Core bit.

Lakefield will first appear later this month within Samsung'due south Galaxy Book S, a two-pound laptop that's approximately half an inch thick. And then far, no pricing has been cited for that device. Merely for some perspective, last year's model of the Galaxy Book South went on auction starting at $999 and featured a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip.

Samsung's Galaxy Book S (Credit: Samsung)

Consumers will likewise exist able to notice Lakefield silicon in Lenovo'south upcoming ThinkPad X1 Fold, billed every bit a foldable PC. (Meet our hands-on preview of the Fold at the link.) That product, pictured below, is basically a laptop/tablet hybrid with a bendable xiii.3-inch OLED panel that covers one side of the device. At CES 2022, Lenovo said the product's starting price will come in at $2,500.

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold

Foveros: Layering on the Silicon

Intel was able to minimize Lakefield'southward footprint past ditching the traditional method of laying the PC'south components across a excursion board. Instead, a 3D-packaging engineering science called Foveros tin 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, tin can also create a more power-efficient processor, extending a laptop's or other device's bombardment life. Co-ordinate to Intel, a Lakefield fleck tin reduce a device's standby power consumption past up to 91 percent when compared to an 8th-generation Intel processor.

The Lakefield SoCs besides feature a unique five-core, five-thread setup. A single 10-nanometer (nm) "Sunny Cove" core on the chip tin 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 then-called "big.LITTLE" architectural arrangements that have been employed for some time in the high-finish mobile processors used in today's flagship smartphones.

2 Flavors of Lakefield, to Beginning

The processors will arrive in two forms: Core i5 and Core i3. As you can see beneath in the table provided by Intel, the Core i5-L16G7 variant has a one.4GHz base clock speed, which can be boosted to 1.8GHz. Even so, the bit'southward single-cadre clock speed can reach a turbo-boosted speed of 3GHz, likely when the "large" Sunny Cove core kicks in for more enervating tasks.

chip specifications (Credit: Intel)

Both chips require simply vii watts of power, significantly less than the 15-watt and 25-watt tenth-generation "Water ice Lake" chips Intel launched last year. In addition, the Lakefield processors can also be configured to back up Wi-Fi 6 and an LTE modem.

Today'due south announcement from Intel may feel a bit lackluster, seeing as only two Lakefield-adopting products were name-checked. Only Intel expects the Lakefield fries 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.