With all the news circulating after CES and Intel’s own reports, we can expect a lot of big things from the tech giant in 2022. The company is promising to ship over 4 million discrete GPUs this year, but we’re hoping to at least see that missing Elden Ring zero-day driver. Today, we took a look at some of the smaller Intel innovations that look set to make their way into the new Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro series.
Intel has been releasing a new line of well-received 12th generation chips for some time now, and the powerful H-series works well on gaming laptops. The Evo series of laptops based on Intel processors combine the power of the company’s CPU with the power of a GPU to create a fairly lightweight device with a premium look. Just recently, Intel introduced us to mobile-centric P and U-series Alder Lake chips, which come in over 20 different flavors. It is reported that they are already implemented in more than 250 devices, and it is very likely that the Samsung Galaxy Book2 Pro may be one of the first.
The press release for Samsung’s new line of thin laptops with Windows 11 lists 12th Gen Intel Core i7 and i5 processors for both the Galaxy Book2 Pro and Galaxy Book2 Pro 360. It also states that it uses the latest Intel 12-Gen processors of the generation. While this doesn’t necessarily fully confirm that these will be Alder Lake’s new P or U-series mobile chips rather than H-series, it does seem likely, especially given the size of these devices.
They will also be paired with new Intel graphics cards. While the lower-end models look like they’ll run Intel Iris Xe graphics, Intel Arc looks set to be an option on at least one of the Galaxy Book2 Pros.
These devices are clearly not designed for gaming. Most of the promotional offerings are for call scaling features such as Auto Framing and bi-directional artificial noise-canceling speakers, so it’s clearly positioned as a trendy productivity device. However, some of those specs, including the option for 32GB DDR5 memory and up to 1TB SSD, definitely make me curious to see how it performs as a portable gaming device. With the recent launch of Steam Deck, this year could be the year of ultra-portable PC gaming.
