Intel Lakefield benchmarks deliver bad news for Surface Neo

Intel recently announced the new Intel Lakefield processors which were advertised as ultra-low power SoCs. While the chips are due to come in devices later this year, Notebookcheck got their hands on an early sample and managed to run some benchmarks on the SoC.

Unfortunately, the benchmarks show that Intel Lakefield does not meet the expectations and Notebookcheck noted that the processor couldn’t even reach it’s advertised 3.0 GHz clock speed. Moreover, the SoC ended being 67% slower than Amber Lake processors even though Intel promised a 12% boost in single-threaded compute-intensive applications when compared to Amber Lake. The good news is that Lakefield might improve the battery life of the device as it shows some potential in that area but Notebookcheck was not able to perform the battery tests.

This slow performance might hurt Microsoft’s Surface Neo that is expected to launch with Intel Lakefield processors. While the Neo launch had been delayed, the early benchmark results could mean that the device won’t be as powerful as Microsoft and Intel have been advertising it to be since the launch.