Intel Arc GPU squeezes into Samsung’s lightweight Galaxy Book2 Pro

Samsung's Galaxy Book2 series of laptops
Enlarge / Samsung’s Galaxy Book2 series of laptops.

Samsung announced this week that it will refresh its Galaxy Book line of thin-and-light laptops with the help of Intel’s long-awaited Arc graphics. Samsung will join the likes of Acer, whose Swift X laptop is one of the first to use the Arc mobile GPU.

We’re still waiting to hear more about Arc, but this month, Team Blue promised to ship its GPUs in Q1 of this year, with desktop Arc graphics cards to ship in Q2 and workstation GPUs in Q3.

That puts Samsung’s newly announced 15.6-inch Galaxy Book2 Pro right on schedule and should make it one of the first Arc-based laptops when it comes out on April 1. This is a thin-and-light laptop, not a gaming one, measuring just 0.52 inches thick and weighing 2.58 pounds. So don’t expect it to show the full capabilities of Intel’s Alchemist architecture.

The 15.6-inch Galaxy Book2 Pro will also have integrated Iris Xe graphics via its Intel 12th-Gen mobile Core i7 or i5 CPU. It will come with 8, 16, or 32GB of LPDDR5 memory and up to 1TB of SSD storage. Port-wise, you have Thunderbolt 4, USB-C, USB-A, a headphone jack, microSD card reader, and optional SIM card slot for 5G.

Additionally, there will be a 13.3-inch Galaxy Book2 Pro that’s similar but won’t have the option for Arc or 5G. Its speakers won’t be as powerful either (4 W versus 5 W). Samsung also announced for April 1 the Book2 Pro 360 (13.3 and 15.6 inches) that will rely on integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics via 12th-Gen i7 or i5 CPUs.

The Book2 Pro 360 laptops (pictured) come in silver, graphite, or burgundy with 500-nit HDR screens.
Enlarge / The Book2 Pro 360 laptops (pictured) come in silver, graphite, or burgundy with 500-nit HDR screens.

All the laptops in this Book2 Pro-series will use a 1080p webcam, compared to the current generation’s 720p. The higher-res cameras also have an 87-degree field of view, up from 77 degrees. The cameras include popular software-based features like Auto Framing (to keep you in the center of the frame when moving) and Face Effect (to improve the image). Also for video calls, there are AI-based VoIP apps (like Zoom, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger) to cancel unwanted noise coming on both ends of the call.

New software

The brand is making a gentle attempt to build an Apple-like ecosystem, with branding on your laptop, smartphone, and headphones, too. Samsung also said during a press briefing that the Galaxy Tab S7-series and S8-series smartphones could be more easily used as a second screen for the company’s laptops. And you could use the new laptops’ keyboard and trackpad to navigate the Tab S8 series. Further, the newly announced Single Sign-On with Samsung Account feature is meant to streamline logins across Samsung devices and apps while making Galaxy Buds ready to pair via Bluetooth.

Samsung is also for the first time preloading the Galaxy Books with an app called Samsung Device Care. In its announcement, the vendor said it lets you check the laptop’s “efficiency” and offers “ways to optimize power and storage to ensure consistent performance throughout the lifespan of the device.”

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1837330