A leaked benchmark has revealed an upcoming Galaxy Book laptop from Samsung with a whopping 14-core Intel processor. The benchmark was spotted by NotebookCheck, and reveals some juicy details about the future of both Samsung and Intel-powered laptops.
Intel’s upcoming 12th Gen Alder Lake chips are expected to drop later this year, but only in their desktop form, otherwise known as Alder Lake-S. These highly anticipated chips are the first to move to Intel 7 (previously known as 10nm), the company’s next-gen processor node. But according to this new leak, there’s reason to get excited about what Intel might be doing on the laptop front. too.
Samsung seems to be going all-in on this refresh of its Galaxy Book line with the 12th-gen Alder Lake chips. A recent User Benchmark database entry for a Samsung 930QED has some eye-boggling specs: Most notably a chip with 14 cores.
That’s a massive leap up from what Intel currently offers in laptops of this sort. The 11th-gen Intel U-series processors are stuck at quad-core CPUs for thin and light laptops, lagging behind AMD’s 8-core options. A processor like this could help put the company back on top, especially in terms of multi-core performance. More cores could make this new Galaxy Book an absolute beast for productivity and content creation.
That beefy processor is paired with what appears to be LPDDR5X memory. If that’s true, the Galaxy Book would be one of the first laptops to have the new generation of RAM, which significantly boosts 5G speeds and performance for high-resolution augmented and virtual reality.
One shouldn’t read too much into the performance at the moment, though. While a 14-core processor sounds impressive, the average clock speed currently sits at 2.25GHz. This is still probably an early development unit, so the performance will likely improve.
The unit also doesn’t appear to be running any discrete graphics. It does have Intel Iris Xe-LP, which comes paired with the Alder Lake CPUs.
All of this information lines up with Samsung’s current Galaxy Book offerings, which aim to be mobile-friendly laptops with stellar performance and 5G/LTE support. With the addition of LPDDR5X RAM, users could expect better memory management and improved 5G connection speeds.
The SSD is perhaps the least interesting part of the upgrade, as it’s a type users have seen before. It’s a 256GB Samsung SSD, and it will have upgrade options just like every other laptop.
We can expect Alder Lake-equipped laptops to ship in early 2022. If this is what Samsung is prepping for its Galaxy Book lineup, next year should have several interesting releases in the high-end laptop sector.