Samsung Galaxy Book2 is coming soon, priced from $999

[HEXUS]

This is a Windows 10 always connected 2-in-1 powered by the 10nm Snapdragon 850.

Read more.

[nobodyspecial]

Bring the perf up to whatever makes it a 10hr battery life and we'll talk. This all day crap sucks. MORE POWER, or at least put it in there so I can downclock it if desired. Shipping as UNDERPOWERED for $999 is a sin punishable by death JK of course. Well, nah, you should be shot for doing this. 10hrs is just over a work day with some time to spare so you should lean toward that goal outright, and just give us the setting for say 20hrs life or 10hr life. Clock it to 10hr for gaming/power apps or something then 20hr for web browsing crap/light work. I hope this sells 1 unit...LOL. Just like cell phones, tired of slinder useless battery phones, double the back and I'm in. Phones don't even feel REAL in my hands these days and I'd rather have MEGA perf for a bit more weight, or better yet offer phones with two back sizes I'm guessing thin phones would DIE a quick death or become niche. Most would rather have more perf or longer life via mega battery power and it only has to last 10yrs or so as we all plug in at home anyway if needed.

MORE PERF people, and LARGER battery...PERIOD. How about 4ghz

[philehidiot]

I'm guessing they know the price is stupid and are just aiming at the luxury market, going for low volume and high margin.

Windows RT 2.0?

[peterb]

Bring the perf up to whatever makes it a 10hr battery life and we'll talk. This all day crap sucks. MORE POWER, or at least put it in there so I can downclock it if desired. Shipping as UNDERPOWERED for $999 is a sin punishable by death JK of course. Well, nah, you should be shot for doing this. 10hrs is just over a work day with some time to spare so you should lean toward that goal outright, and just give us the setting for say 20hrs life or 10hr life. Clock it to 10hr for gaming/power apps or something then 20hr for web browsing crap/light work. I hope this sells 1 unit...LOL. Just like cell phones, tired of slinder useless battery phones, double the back and I'm in. Phones don't even feel REAL in my hands these days and I'd rather have MEGA perf for a bit more weight, or better yet offer phones with two back sizes I'm guessing thin phones would DIE a quick death or become niche. Most would rather have more perf or longer life via mega battery power and it only has to last 10yrs or so as we all plug in at home anyway if needed.

MORE PERF people, and LARGER battery...PERIOD. How about 4ghz

Why do you want it perforated? Ventilation? Cooling?

[TooNice]

Just like cell phones, tired of slinder useless battery phones, double the back and I'm in. Phones don't even feel REAL in my hands these days and I'd rather have MEGA perf for a bit more weight, or better yet offer phones with two back sizes I'm guessing thin phones would DIE a quick death or become niche. Most would rather have more perf or longer life via mega battery power and it only has to last 10yrs or so as we all plug in at home anyway if needed.

M'well, for mobiles, slap in a large battery (e.g. one of those Zero Lemon) and you have the brick you want.

Personally, I kind of lament the size of phones nowadays. They are too big (length/width) for comfortable one handed use as someone with small hands, yet too thin to include a battery that last a decent amount of time. That is pretty much why I usually get one of those extended batteries/battery case - since I need two hands to use anyway, might as well have a phone that lasts. Need to point out for that for phones, I do care about them lasting over 10 hours. My life isn't just going to an office and coming home, long battery life is handy during travels (reduces the need to hunt for a place to charge), and some outdoor excursions lasting over 10 hours before I can charge. Tablets, at first glance may not need that requirements as they are often in places where it can be charged, but I've seen them used, for instance alongside DSLR for photography work where it can be used to more easily change settings, have a bigger screen to preview shots taken etc. And those again can be used places where charging is not readily available.

[nobodyspecial]

This is a tablet, but yeah if needed...LOL. Surely they can do something to cool it more. Not sure it's even needed much, as I doubt these running at 2.9ghz will be heaters at 7nm. It's just trying to claim all day battery life crap. Tablets aren't prone to water much, so ventilate it or make it thicker etc.

That said, same for phone. I think they concentrate so much on thinner and lighter we don't know what a bigger one could dissipate in most cases. Hopefully a 7nm phone will come with mega battery and up the clocks so we can see, but I doubt it. Make the chip bigger/wider or something, apple gets a tons of perf due to always having the largest chips and that perf doesn't cause hand burning (well a few of everything with china parts lights on fire at some point right? LOL). Quit trying to make $25 socs, and start making $50-100 versions (that double as laptop versions and low-end desktops too). I'm thinking of a $1 part on a space shuttle blowing it all up right now

Where is my full laptop with this chip running 4ghz with a fan/heatsink? Where is the desktop running with a massive hyper212evo or some such. They need to build one prototype just to try this. How far can they go if a heatsink/fan is strapped to it, or do they need to totally revamp it for higher hz? Not sure AFAIK. ARM's side should be working on 85w chips and working with a few heatsink/fan vendors to get this done. If you doubled the size of these chips you'd end up in Intel chip territory anyway, so lets go head to head and find out Even if they just upped the battery and gpu some I'd be more happy. GAMING! No point in hooking a slouch up to TV for gaming. These are expensive light work machines at best.

Apple conquered phones with games (pushes home users) and exchange support (rimm death). Nobody else seems to get why apple is at or on top. GAMES and of course the ecosystem around it. But it was the GAMES the made it worth having in the pocket over others for quite a while. I was hoping NV would spend far more on GAMES themselves or buying small firms to make exclusives now that they fat rich to some extent, but they haven't got it yet. Same with roku, plop in a NV soc, sell a game pad with or on the side, and BOOM you sell far more than 8-10mil so far over YEARS. You'd be doing that yearly then, instead of TOTAL over ~5 gens. Why is it stuck streaming only? GET GAMES, and sell a ton more units, and NV's soc plays the most cool stuff with great perf (well duh, it's running desktop/console ports all day on PC, console etc) on ARM side. Not sure why they don't get it. GAMES sell parts. I just bought Intel not long ago just due to the game hits on AMD (well and watts/heat still an issues, waiting 7nm to buy AMD and dump 8700k on dad). NV's socs don't cost that much more. I'd shell out an extra 20-30 for NV soc in a roku, and make it work with xbox/sony controllers to save us costs and sell more. Tired of new roku's with lacking power in under 2yrs. Roku2 almost useless, 3 telling me to add mem sticks, only 4 is still running seemingly great still. They are ALWAYS "just good enough" to stream for a bit after you buy it. Yeah, I want more power in everything...ROFL

[Faiakes]

$1000 for a mobile phone SoC?!?

I suppose some phones cost more than that now but:

- why not use the 8th Gen Intel Core Y-Series processors, like Core i7-8500, i5-8200Y, m3-8100Y at 5W (10 less than the previous gen!). That would also make it fanless.

Add another USB-C or two while you're at it (or a mini HDMI/Display Port) and have a genuine success in your hands...

Honestly, why is it so difficult for someone at Samsung to think of these things?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

$1000 for a mobile phone SoC?!?

I suppose some phones cost more than that now but:

- why not use the 8th Gen Intel Core Y-Series processors, like Core i7-8500, i5-8200Y, m3-8100Y at 5W (10 less than the previous gen!). That would also make it fanless.

Add another USB-C or two while you're at it (or a mini HDMI/Display Port) and have a genuine success in your hands...

Honestly, why is it so difficult for someone at Samsung to think of these things?

More profits??

[Faiakes]

Yes! They seem to block rational thought

[philehidiot]

Do bear in mind that these SoCs are really getting rather nippy. Apple's latest is approaching a decent desktop CPU in benchmarks which can be run on both (not that many). Whilst the ARM ones are quite far behind, I suspect that's mostly due to how much power they're willing to throw at them in a phone. Apple clearly doesn't care about this and will extract as much as the battery can give, hence the issues with iphones slowing down with older batteries. In a larger chassis with a decently sized battery, it'll be very intersting to see how this thing benches.

I also suspect that we are not the target market here. I think this is aimed at management consultant type people who want a do it all for office productivity, email and surfing that they can take to work and then carry on using it in their hotel room as a tablet laid on the bed / sat in the bar and not have to worry about battery. People with lots of disposible income who will throw money at something for relatively minor conveniences. Also, if for the target market the SoC is good enough then they also get the bonus of the modem being integrated and all that jazz so there's less R&D.

I do think that 4GB of RAM is absolutely atrocious for a Windows machine at this price point. It's just about enough for a phone which does a little bit of multitasking but it's certainly not enough for Windows. I'd also say the storage is a little mean.

Critically, perhaps, whilst there is emulation for x86 software, I have read that Windows for ARM does not run 64-bit applications (EDIT: native ARM 64-bit is fine but x86 emulation is 32-bit only, also no OpenGL and little driver support). This could be a nasty surprise for uninformed purchasers.

[TooNice]

Yeah, I want more power in everything...ROFL

But that is probably not what most people want. For phones to be getting ever thinner for so long, the demand must be there.

It's just like removable battery. I want it, but need to resign to the fact that the S5 is probably the last phone I will have with that feature because not enough people want it.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Do bear in mind that these SoCs are really getting rather nippy. Apple's latest is approaching a decent desktop CPU in benchmarks which can be run on both (not that many). Whilst the ARM ones are quite far behind, I suspect that's mostly due to how much power they're willing to throw at them in a phone. Apple clearly doesn't care about this and will extract as much as the battery can give, hence the issues with iphones slowing down with older batteries. In a larger chassis with a decently sized battery, it'll be very intersting to see how this thing benches.

The Apple benchmarks whilst impressive are kind of skewed towards Apple as:
1.)The Apple SOC is tested under iOS and probably well optimised for. Ideal testing should be under identical OSes.
2.)If you are referring to the AT tests - they took the unusual step of using a low clockspeed server CPU,when there are Core M CPUs which similar Turbo clockspeeds.
3.)They tested only a single core benchmark.
4.)The A12 chip is huge - sure it has a GPU and AI stuff,but it has 6.9 billion transistors,ie,more than a 4C/8T AMD Raven Ridge for example which has just under 5 billion transistors. The Apple chip is a dual core with no SMT with 4 tiny cores for low level tasks,and the AMD chip has 4 times the number of effective threads in high performance scenarios.
5.)Like many of these phone companies they are relying on new nodes,but unlike AMD or Intel have little experience if they can't jump to new ones quickly.Literally all the clockspeed jumps have been down to new nodes.
6.)The Apple cores are very wide(wider than what AMD or Intel uses) and low clockspeed,so these need to kept fed,ie,how well will they scale to more cores with limited bandwidth and how can they keep the cores utilised effectively. One of the reasons behind SMT was to keep cores fully utilised at any one point AFAIK(I could be wrong here).
7.)Regarding the power argument - Apple SOCs have a low core count compared to many of the other ARM designs,so those other ones that have 4 high performance cores in a phone,are going to hit a per core power consumption and TDP limit much quicker IMHO.

[philehidiot]

The Apple benchmarks whilst impressive are kind of skewed towards Apple as:
1.)The Apple SOC is tested under iOS and probably well optimised for. Ideal testing should be under identical OSes.
2.)If you are referring to the AT tests - they took the unusual step of using a low clockspeed server CPU,when there are Core M CPUs which similar Turbo clockspeeds.
3.)They tested only a single core benchmark.
4.)The A12 chip is huge - sure it has a GPU and AI stuff,but it has 6.9 billion transistors,ie,more than a 4C/8T AMD Raven Ridge for example which has just under 5 billion transistors. The Apple chip is a dual core with no SMT with 4 tiny cores for low level tasks,and the AMD chip has 4 times the number of effective threads in high performance scenarios.
5.)Like many of these phone companies they are relying on new nodes,but unlike AMD or Intel have little experience if they can't jump to new ones quickly.Literally all the clockspeed jumps have been down to new nodes.
6.)The Apple cores are very wide(wider than what AMD or Intel uses) and low clockspeed,so these need to kept fed,ie,how well will they scale to more cores with limited bandwidth and how can they keep the cores utilised effectively. One of the reasons behind SMT was to keep cores fully utilised at any one point AFAIK(I could be wrong here).
7.)Regarding the power argument - Apple SOCs have a low core count compared to many of the other ARM designs,so those other ones that have 4 high performance cores in a phone,are going to hit a per core power consumption and TDP limit much quicker IMHO.

Thanks for that, I didn't know most of it.

Does Apple use ARM designs? I was under the impression they designed their own. Or do they design their own but using the ARM IP?

And yes, I was referring to the recent AT testing. I was aware of some, but not all of those limitations. I think, for a phone, the performance of the iPhones is pretty damned impressive. I think I read somewhere they're releasing a full version of photoshop for Apple tablets which in itself demonstrates how potent these chips are. I assume though that being wide and slow will work well with things like photoshop? It's beyond my level of knowledge to be honest.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Thanks for that, I didn't know most of it.

Does Apple use ARM designs? I was under the impression they designed their own. Or do they design their own but using the ARM IP?

And yes, I was referring to the recent AT testing. I was aware of some, but not all of those limitations. I think, for a phone, the performance of the iPhones is pretty damned impressive. I think I read somewhere they're releasing a full version of photoshop for Apple tablets which in itself demonstrates how potent these chips are. I assume though that being wide and slow will work well with things like photoshop? It's beyond my level of knowledge to be honest.

The Apple SOCs are using the ARM instruction set,but they use their own custom cores. The advantage of wide and lower clocked is probably power consumption AFAIK. The closest ARM cores are the Samsung Exynos M3 and the Nvidia Carmel AFAIK,but the Samsung has some issues on the firmware/software side which hasn't help performance at all(hence why this is very important). Apparently the AMD custom ARM core,the K12,was Zen level in performance,but AMD apparently canned it due to a lack of resources which was sad.