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Samsung adds the Galaxy Book Go (5G) to its laptop range

by Mark Tyson on 3 June 2021, 13:11

Tags: Samsung (005935.KS), Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM), ARM

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Last week we saw Qualcomm launch its latest Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 which it designed targeting affordable laptops. Today Samsung has announced the Galaxy Book Go, built upon this platform. But that isn't all, Samsung has built a stablemate called the Galaxy Book Go 5G, which is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 5G.

These new portables from Samsung are pitched as affordable solutions, with the Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 version priced from US$349. Despite the bargain pricing, the laptops might fill a gap in your portable computing needs; especially with their thin and light nature, long-lasting battery, and cellular LTE and 5G connection possibilities.

At the time of writing Samsung is only sharing the spec list for the cheaper Galaxy Book Go which comes with the Snapdragon 7c Gen 2, 4/8GB of LPDDR4X RAM (not upgradable), and 64/128GB of eUFS storage. I'd expect the Go 5G to be similar in size (323.9 x 224.8 x 14.9mm), weight (1.38kg), and also be built around a 14-inch FHD screen, but it could have better RAM/storage and screen options. I'd expect the Galaxy Book Go 5G to cost quite a bit more than its little brother too, as the SD7c Gen 2 base model is Wi-Fi only, and will cost extra for the 4G/LTE version.

As well as being eminently portable, and offering great battery life, Samsung has designed the Galaxy Book Go models for toughness, with the 5G model having passed Mil-STD-810G tests. Samsung makes a song and dance about these Windows laptops playing smoothly with the Galaxy smartphone and smart device ecosystem, if that is something you will find attractive.

Samsung is making the Galaxy Book Go with Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 available later this month, depending on your location. It costs from US$349. The Galaxy Book Go 5G will be available "later this year".

HEXUS Forums :: 8 Comments

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Posted by 3dcandy - Thu 03 Jun 2021 13:28
So this is effectively a Windows type device with a similar chip to an M1 powered fruity device…

Let's see if people rave about them as much as M1 chips (which I seriously doubt)
Posted by LSG501 - Thu 03 Jun 2021 15:36
3dcandy
So this is effectively a Windows type device with a similar chip to an M1 powered fruity device…

Let's see if people rave about them as much as M1 chips (which I seriously doubt)
Not quite, this is an udpdated version of the old 7c and 8c chips from 2019 which are pretty poor performing in all honesty (think versus celeron sort of range), at least with the current windows on arm and it's emulation.

Having said that at those prices I doubt we should really complain about performance too much and in all honesty if this had a 2in1 form factor I might have considered grabbing one to play around with.
Posted by 3dcandy - Thu 03 Jun 2021 15:51
LSG501
Not quite, this is an udpdated version of the old 7c and 8c chips from 2019 which are pretty poor performing in all honesty (think versus celeron sort of range), at least with the current windows on arm and it's emulation.

Having said that at those prices I doubt we should really complain about performance too much and in all honesty if this had a 2in1 form factor I might have considered grabbing one to play around with.

I said effectively…. you will never get apples to apples. 8 cores and up to 16 gig ram means it's as close as you'll get for a well known manufacturer with Windows ARM on board. I've argued all along the market for an M1 powered Windows ARM based machine is tiny - Apple only does it because they have everything to do it, and because Intel couldn't give them the kind of chip they needed
Posted by 3dcandy - Thu 03 Jun 2021 16:07
LSG501
3dcandy
So this is effectively a Windows type device with a similar chip to an M1 powered fruity device…

Let's see if people rave about them as much as M1 chips (which I seriously doubt)
Not quite, this is an udpdated version of the old 7c and 8c chips from 2019 which are pretty poor performing in all honesty (think versus celeron sort of range), at least with the current windows on arm and it's emulation.

Having said that at those prices I doubt we should really complain about performance too much and in all honesty if this had a 2in1 form factor I might have considered grabbing one to play around with.

Oh and much of the problem is that Windows ARM is truly awful in many ways….
Posted by LSG501 - Thu 03 Jun 2021 17:20
3dcandy
I said effectively…. you will never get apples to apples. 8 cores and up to 16 gig ram means it's as close as you'll get for a well known manufacturer with Windows ARM on board. I've argued all along the market for an M1 powered Windows ARM based machine is tiny - Apple only does it because they have everything to do it, and because Intel couldn't give them the kind of chip they needed

The 7c and 8c are the bottom of the range snapdragon for laptops, the 8cx and then the ‘custom’ sq2 are higher up the ladder and even then aren't really performance comparable to apple's cpu due to basically being ‘upscaled mobile cpu’s' rather than being designed for desktop, this doesn't exactly help performance. Hopefully the rumours of samsung/amd and MS doing a custom chip are true, it's needed because snapdragon is currently lacking outside mobile cpu's.

To be fair to windows on arm, part of the issue is the need to support legacy code (for businesses) unlike on os-x where apple can basically just throw out anything they don't like every few years (not to mention unix at it's core works differently). Having said that, and while I'm not saying it's 100% accurate, it's also been shown via using a mac m1 and parallels that a LOT of the performance issues on windows for arm is on the cpu side because it performs considerably better in a vm than the snapdragon cpu's do without using a vm.

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