Lakefield Details

The Lakefield SoC has a unique core configuration for an Intel SoC. This was their first foray into using both high performance and low power cores on the same chip. In Lakefield, there are 4 Tremont cores from their ‘Atom’ range, and a single Sunny Cove core from their ‘Core’ family. The Sunny Cove cores were also used in Intel’s 11th gen laptop designs, a.k.a Ice Lake (the 11th gen desktop parts used a different version of the core). This leads to an unusual configuration: it’s referred to as a 1+4 configuration by most of the tech press, given that it was 1 “big” core and 4 “little” cores, if we borrow Arm’s parlance.

This core config was paired with a somewhat large implementation of Intel’s Gen11 GPU. It sits at 64 EUs, or execution units. Gen11 graphics were only ever implemented at up to 64 EUs, so this represents the largest configuration available for the integrated GPU. However, it’s run at a rather low clock – maxing at 500MHz. Other Ice Lake implementations peaked at 1100MHz.

It’s clear here that this is an efficiency play by Intel: using a larger GPU and running it at lower clock speeds is better for power consumption than using a GPU half the size at twice the clock speed. According to Anandtech’s analysis, using such a large GPU implementation means 37% of the Compute Die is used just for graphics.

Two Dice: Base and Compute

Lakefield is also unique for Intel in that it’s their first SoC designed with 3D stacking. In this case, the SoC consists of a Compute Die and a Base Die, with the Compute Die sitting atop the Base Die. The Compute Die contains the CPU cores, GPU, LPDDR4X controller, the last level cache, ring interconnect, etc. In short, all the things necessary for computing to happen.

The Base Die contains all the I/O for the chip – things like PCIe 3.0 lanes (albeit only 8 of them here), USB controllers, networking controllers, audio codec, UFS storage controller, etc.

The advantage of separating these as Intel has is twofold: 1) you increase overall yield by having 2 chips half the size compared to 1 monolithic chip and 2) you can choose manufacturing processes to cater to both cost and each die’s strengths. For #2, Intel chose to manufacture the Compute Die on their second-generation 10nm process, “10nm+”, whereas the Base Die was created using a specialized low-power version of their 22nm process they call 22FFL.

Mixing and matching processes like this is something AMD does in their Ryzen chips – but they use an active interposer and “2.5D” stacking, meaning the chips are not on top of each other, but placed next to each other on the package.

You’ll note that the LPDDR4X controller is placed on the Compute Die. This is because Lakefield is designed to use PoP RAM, or Package-on-Package. This is what’s done in most phones today: it means the RAM is stacked on top of the SoC itself. This is relatively unique for Intel to do in a large-screen-compute focused device, but it makes sense for their goals (smallest size, super-low idle power).

All in all, this seems like an very intriguing processor from a process perspective, and I can’t help but wonder if it was used as a sort of pipe cleaning exercise to work out how to manufacture stacked chips like this. This is the first chip to use a stacked Foveros implementation (Intel’s name for their in-package connectivity between dies), and would pose a lot of new challenges to manufacturing and packaging the end product. Better to do it on a low-volume product and roll it out slowly.

Today’s Test Device: The Galaxy Book S

Given that Lakefield was destined for low power devices, testing it will always be inexorably linked to the device in which it’s implemented. I’m aware of just two devices that have implemented Lakefield: the Samsung Galaxy Book S and the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Fold. The latter is a halo device that’s a foldable 13″ tablet. I’d love to try one out, but initial reviews have been decidedly lackluster on it. I’m not willing to sacrifice the capital required on what sounds like a very “beta” quality device.

This brings us to today’s device-under-test: the Galaxy Book S, also referred to sometimes by Samsung as the Galaxy Book S WiFi to differentiate it from its sister device that runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx SoC instead of this one’s Intel Lakefield SoC. I picked this up via Microcenter as an open box, where it was listed at $306. The laptop appears to be in perfect condition, so it seems this was just a returned device. Original MSRP was $999, and the base model comes with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of UFS 3.0 storage.

First Impressions

The first impressions on opening the box were “oh it’s a small computer, huh? I love small computers.” This impression continued when picking it up and sitting it next to my daily driver MacBook Air. The Air is by no means a large device, but it’s noticeably heavier than the Galaxy Book S, and the Galaxy Book S’s overall dimensions are notably smaller.

The laptop nearly fails the one-finger opening test, whereby you attempt to lift the lid of the laptop with one finger without holding down the base. The hinge is indeed a little stiffer than I would find ideal, but it’s possible Samsung decided on a little more weight to the hinge because they included a touchscreen.

For I/O, there are exactly 3 ports: a USB-C on either side, and a headphone jack. I appreciate Samsung including a USB-C on each side, as it’s annoying to only have the ports on one side of a laptop as on the MacBook Air. Either port can be used to charge the device.

Galaxy Book S Internals

Inside, there’s really not much to look at. Opening the laptop involves removing the asymmetrical rubber feet to access 4 screws, and then using a spudger or pry tool to pry the plastic back off the bottom. This is usually a harrowing experience with laptops, as the press-fit parts feel like they’re going to break when trying to pry them off, and that’s no different here. I would’ve very much liked to see the bottom be metal as the rest of the device is, which I also think would’ve aided with heat dissipation.

What we can see is the soldered on Intel Wi-Fi card, and the USB-C ports on the left and right on daughter boards. This is in theory good for repairability, but I don’t know how easy it is to get your hands on parts like this. There is no visible DRAM, as the DRAM is packaged on top of the SoC.

At the top of the image, you can see the copper heatsink that I removed from the device to see if there was anything else notable to find about the mainboard. There are 2 copper heatpipes that help dissipate heat from the SoC, and as we’ll see later, they seem sufficient for the 7W TDP of this processor.

The heatsink itself also had a black sheet attached to it that felt plasticky. This went down and covered the battery. I don’t know what material it was made of, but I can only conjecture that it was for either extra heat dissipation from the heatsink to the rest of the device, or it’s some sort of additional covering for the battery. My money is on the former, as the latter doesn’t provide a solid reason for attaching the sheet to the SoC’s heatsink.

I’ll say again: I wish the bottom of this laptop was metal, especially given its introductory price of $999. If they added additional heat dissipation material down here, the SoC would’ve been even better cooled, possibly allowing it to have a higher power limit.

Lakefield Performance

Inconsistent Performer

While testing, the Galaxy Book S exhibited very odd behavior under Windows 10. It appears that the CPU portion of the processor was limited to about 5W total power while plugged in, but was allowed to boost to approximately 7W indefinitely while running on battery. This seems like a bug in the firmware or in Samsung’s drivers for Windows 10, as with Windows 11, the issue is essentially gone, and the laptop behaves as I would expect: identically while both plugged in and on battery power. The results for Windows 10 are summarized in the charts below. The power was taken from the reported values in ThrottleStop.

I will note that the plugged-in behavior was very inconsistent. Sometimes it showed 1500MHz on all cores, other times it showed 1800MHz for the P-core and 1400MHz for the E-cores. Most often, it showed 1500MHz for all cores, so I’ve put that in the table, but I was never completely sure which behavior I would end up seeing. The most consistent behavior and highest performance while plugged in was seen using “SAMSUNG Mode” in the battery settings, rather than the built-in Windows 10 power modes. On battery, the different modes led to a few cases of inconsistent behavior, but generally not to the same extent as the plugged in results.

In Windows 11, both plugged in and on battery, the behavior was essentially identical to what’s shown on the “Battery” line in the table for Windows 10.

Benchmarks

In absolute terms, this CPU is not going to win any races. Its closest competitor performance-wise would be the dual-core i3 MacBook Air released in 2020 with an Intel i3-1000NG4, or the m3-10100Y in the Surface Go 3. It’s a bit slower than the former, and a bit faster than the latter. This is minorly impressive given its power consumption of under 7W for these benchmarks. Below are Geekbench 5.4.4 comparisons between these two devices and the Galaxy Book S.

Battery vs. Plugged-In Performance

Below I’ve compared the Galaxy Book S to the M1 MacBook Air for illustrative purposes. The M1 Air represents basically the best performing fanless laptop on the market in terms of hardware. The M1 Air basically embarrasses the Galaxy Book S in every CPU benchmark, which is to be expected given that the M1 Air’s SoC uses approximately 20-25W of power at peak usage, and none of our tests are long enough to trigger significant throttling in that chip. If you assume a 2x difference in power consumption, Lakefield doesn’t look so bad. That’s the worst sort of napkin math, but try and look at these benchmarks with that context.

What we see here is that the performance cores in the M1 are about 2x the throughput of Lakefield’s performance core. Given that the M1 has four of those cores, the multi-core disparity is enormous.

The one anomaly to point out in Windows 11 is Dolphin. That benchmark was consistently slower while plugged in compared to on batter, which is not behavior seen in Windows 10. Suffice to say: this laptop has quite inconsistent behavior, even in its most well-behaved mode.

GPU Performance

For GPU workloads, ThrottleStop reported peak power at 9W. Interestingly, under both Windows 10 and Windows 11, Ice Storm Extreme performance was halved when on battery compared to when plugged in. This was the only graphics benchmark that showed that kind of massive difference between the two, which leads me to believe there’s something else going on with that specific benchmark.

Wild Life Extreme showed a difference in Windows 10, but not 11, and FFXIV showed the reverse. These were all very repeatable after restarts, etc. All I can say is that the throttling behavior of this device is very inconsistent based on this investigation. Further comparison would be best done by looking at Notebookcheck’s results, which are in line with what I’ve seen while testing this device.

As a reference point: The M1 Air scored a comparatively massive 4530 in Wild Life extreme, which is about 5 times the score of Lakefield. Again, the M1 Air consumes more power, but it appears the GPU is significantly better than Lakefield’s. Remember: Lakefield is limited to less than half of the typical clock speed for Intel’s Gen11 graphics.

You’re not really going to be playing games on this laptop unless they’re 10 years old, or very very basic indie games, so I don’t see these GPU benchmarks as a problem for this device.

Low Power, but Responsive

Benchmarks are one thing, but everyday use is another. Based on my experience with previous dual-core m3 Intel SoCs, Lakefield represents a significant improvement in responsiveness. With the dual-core SoCs, I would find myself waiting on windows become responsive when switching between tasks.

With this Lakefield processor, I rarely found that to happen, even while running benchmarks. I attribute this to having more physical cores available to service user input, UI elements, etc. I was able to get it to bog down some by having 20 Chrome tabs open alongside the usual messaging apps and OneNote, but I think that’s the device running out of memory more than anything else.

All in all, I’m a fan of this SoC from a day-to-day use perspective. I’m looking forward to the Alder Lake equivalent. Supposedly we’re getting a similar TDP 1+4 CPU using the new cores present in Alder Lake (Golden Cove for P-core and Gracemont for E-cores). The Gracemont cores should have similar IPC to Skylake, which will make 4 of them very interesting in such a power constrained chip.

The Galaxy Book S Experience

Keyboard

The keyboard on the Galaxy Book S only takes a minute or so to get used to. It has relatively low travel, but no less travel than most of the ultrabooks today. It’s not my favorite keyboard ever on a laptop, but I have no issues with its key action and general layout.

There are a couple problems with it though. First, the advertised keyboard backlighting is extremely weak, which in general I would be OK with… if I could set it to the max value and go about my day. However, the keyboard backlight is inexorably tied to an ambient light sensor below the screen, even if you attempt to manually set the backlighting level. The only fix I’ve found for it is to tape over the ambient light sensor to make it think you’re in a dark room all the time.

After updating the device to Windows 11, this problem appears to have gone away though. The backlight now maintains the level you set in the Samsung Settings app or the setting that’s toggled to via the function key shortcut.

Second, there’s a function key to access non-Fn buttons on the topmost row. By default, the topmost row contains F1-F12. Pressing and holding the key will let you access the alternate functions like volume and display brightness. Pressing the Fn key once toggles Fn-lock, which makes the function keys map to the alternate functions. This is the mode I would leave it in all the time, except Fn-lock also causes the arrow keys to become Home, PgUp/PgDn, and End. I use those keys as well, but not nearly as often as I use the arrow keys.

I would’ve liked the ability to determine what the defaults were for the top row (F1-F12 or alternate functions), or have it work more like a Mac laptop in that the top rows are defaulted to the alternate functions, with an Fn modifier key switching them to F1-F12. As it stands, the Galaxy Book S implements these differently than I would prefer, with no way to switch.

Finally, I have had an issue here and there with the left control button sticking, which is annoying, but fixable by hitting the key again. That’s not something that should happen on a $999 device from any manufacturer.

The fingerprint sensor is quite fast, and the finish on the keys is a pleasant matte texture, although I do worry about the long-term wear on the keys and whether they will develop any noticeable shiny spots. I’ve seen no indication of that so far, so it may not be an issue.

Trackpad

The trackpad is decent for a Windows machine. As seen in the image, it’s as large as it could be in this chassis. The click action is not great, so I found myself tapping to right-click instead. It detects double clicks more often than I intend though, which seems to be down to the sensitivity. Fiddling with the settings made it a little less prone to do so, but it did not completely alleviate the issue.

Screen

The screen is good, but not great compared to other 2021 laptops, especially the MacBook Air. A resolution of 1080p at 13.3″ is reasonable, but I found myself setting Windows to 100% scaling, as 125% scaling didn’t do much for text sharpness. Text is noticeably sharper on the MacBook Air, which has a 2560×1600 13.3″ screen.

The screen is a resolution of 1920×1080, meaning it’s a 16:9 aspect ratio. The faster this ratio dies out on laptops, the happier I’ll be. Apple’s 16:10 and Microsoft’s 3:2 both seem better to me for a productivity machine. Media and gaming laptops can keep 16:9, but I think everything else should switch to taller ratios, especially if Windows 11 is going to force users to put their taskbar on the bottom of the screen. Allowing the taskbar on the side of the screen at least allows users to regain a little vertical real estate.

The factory calibration seems very good, and Samsung ships the device with a color mode selector that includes a “Photography” mode, which is what I used in my time with the device. This appears to have quite balanced calibration; I didn’t notice a big difference at all between this laptop and the MacBook Air, except that the Samsung laptop is still very slightly more saturated. The Galaxy Book S was able to get noticeably brighter than the MacBook Air though.

The touchscreen is fine, and a welcome addition coming from a MacBook Air. It’s not something I use often, but it’s nice to have. I didn’t note any touch responsiveness or accuracy issues in my time with the device.

The final thing I’ll mention is reflection handling. This is definitely a glossy screen, and does not diffuse reflections as well as the MacBook Air does. Thankfully it gets really bright, so it’s not too much of a problem. Turning that high brightness on probably has an appreciable affect on battery life though.

Battery

The battery seems quite solid for a Windows machine that weighs about two pounds. I got about 7-7.5 hours of real-world usage out of the device fairly reliably. That consisted of writing this piece, general web browsing, and YouTube, with messaging clients open in the background. At 42 Whr, the battery is a little below average for a 13″ laptop, but that’s to be expected in such a svelte device. I wouldn’t want to up the size of the battery too much, or you lose the overall profile and weight of the device, which to me seems like the main selling point.

Standby battery seems reasonable as well. Overnight loss was around 1-2%, which is as good as I’ve personally experienced with a Windows laptop. Standby battery isn’t the same as the M1 based MacBooks though, which seem to be in a league of their own.

Software

Oh god, the bloat…

This is where the device truly falls short in my opinion. The amount of bloatware that was installed in this machine after reinstalling windows to remove the previous password-less user was absolutely bonkers.

To add to that: the bloatware that’s installed either duplicates functionality already in Windows, or does things I do not want Samsung to do for me (a notes app? a PC cleaner? Really? Why?)

After removing all the bloatware, including McAfee (can we stop doing this please?), I tired to figure out how to gather the updates that have been released for this laptop since its release in mid-2020. Looking through Samsung’s support site, I found that Samsung doesn’t provide ANY direct updates, BIOSes, etc for this device. The only way to get updates is via Windows Update or Samsung Update. I’m not even sure if I have all of them. I’m essentially trusting Windows Update and my own sleuthing for things like graphics drivers to have found them all.

Samsung’s “Samsung Update” app does provide some insight on what may be out of date, but I’m not sure how far I trust it. I also believe manufacturers should just have drivers available for download on their site, even if most users will get them via their update app.

Lakefield Compatibility Problems

There were one or two compatibility issues as well. I ran into one app that wanted to only use the Atom cores to do work, and older versions of Cinebench R20 similarly don’t use the P-core in benchmarking. The benchmarks I reported here all seemed to use all the cores equally, with the single-core benchmarks being pegged to the P-core.

Additionally, HWMonitor could detect any temperatures on the laptop. HWiNFO could capture temperature info though. TechPowerUp’s ThrottleStop was generally used to monitor activity, clock speeds, and temperatures. I also attempted to edit the PL1 and PL2 values via ThrottleStop, but like most modern laptops, that was not possible. The voltage controls in that program were also locked

Conclusions

In general, I wanted to like this laptop, and found it responsive enough that it could be my daily driver. I don’t know that I see this being a primary machine for anyone, but if I were in college, knowing I had a desktop at home, I would totally use this for classwork on the go. The lighter weight would be amazing for carrying around.

That said, there are too many compromises for me to justify replacing my daily driver laptop, the M1 MacBook Air. The keyboard wonkiness, lack of updates, and lower resolution screen all make this something I cannot recommend over that device.

However, I initially found out that this device was going for bargain prices via the /r/buildapcsales subreddit, where this was posted at $237.50 directly from Samsung. They sold out immediately at that price point, of course. I personally paid $350 after taxes and had my friend ship the laptop to me. At that kind of pricing, it’s difficult if not impossible to find another device that’s as good as this one to buy instead.

Should You Buy One?

If you can find a Galaxy Book S for under $500 with a warranty, I would say it’s a perfectly reasonable device to pick up and use for schoolwork. I wouldn’t pay any more than that, much less its introductory price of $999. Not when things like the Surface Laptop 4 and the M1 MacBook Air are $999. Samsung even introduced a similar laptop (the Galaxy Book Pro) with a 15W quad-core Intel chip that’s the same size and weight and essentially the same price! Given that, I understand the raft of lukewarm reviews this device received when it launched. However, the device itself is good; the MSRP was very bad.

In the future, I’m very curious to see where a successor chip like this gets used. In my ideal world, Microsoft would pick up the Alder Lake version of this processor and put it in their Surface Laptop Go lineup and reduce that laptop’s weight a bit. But I’m a sucker for small computers, so maybe I’m in the minority there.