The Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite is a reasonably thin and light laptop that sells for a much lower price than the company’s high-end ATIV Book 9 Plus. Unfortunately the original ATIV Book 9 Lite was also overpriced for a laptop with a relatively slow AMD processor that could hardly even compete with an Intel Atom chip.

Now Samsung is giving the ATIV Book 9 Lite a bit of a makeover, and this time the company’s using a faster Intel Core i3-4020Y Haswell processor.

Update: An AMD rep reached out to Liliputing to make it clear that Samsung will continue to offer the AMD model as well as the new Intel Core i3 model. 

samsung ativ book 9 lite with core i3

The new laptop still lacks some of the premium touches found on higher-end ultrabooks. It has a 13.3 inch, 1366 x 768 pixel touchscreen display, for instance, rather than a higher-resolution screen. The laptop doesn’t have a backlit keyboard.

But what you do get is a machine with Intel’s low-power Haswell CPU, Intel HD 4200 graphics, 4GB of RAM, a 128GB solid state drive, 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, 1 USB 3.0 and 1 USB 2.0 port, a micro HDMI port, a flash card reader, and support for Gigabit Ethernet (with an adapter) and a mini VGA adapter.

Samsung claims the notebook will run for up to 8.5 hours, but that seems a bit optimistic for a laptop with a 30Whr battery — even one with an energy efficient Haswell CPU.

The new ATIV Book 9 Lite measures 12.8″ x 8.8″ x 0.67″ and weighs about 3.2 pounds. 

Samsung isn’t yet selling the new ATIV Book 9 Lite in the United States, but a handful or European stores are already selling it for around 700 Euros, which makes it a bit more expensive than the AMD version.

The laptop also showed up recently at Samsung’s Korean website.

via Laptoping and Tech2.hu

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6 replies on “Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite update brings a little Haswell action”

  1. AMD shouldn’t have used a 1ghz processor to begin with. The AMD A6 1450 is made for tablets, not laptops. Yes, it has 4 cores but the single core can only get to 1.4

    They could have went with the AMD A8 4500m (1.9ghz) or the AMD A6 5200 (2.ghz) & I don’t want to hear about their TDP being too much, not when A6 1450 still gets insulted about battery life in this Notebook…

    And Intel is no better. The Haswell Core i3 they are going to use on the Ativ 9 Lite only runs at 1.6 ghz

    Why couldnt Samsung put a Core i3 3217u on this instead? & no I don’t want to pay $ 1000 just to get the Core i5 version of this notebook (the Ativ 9 Plus), thats too much money…

  2. “…that could hardly even compete with an Intel Atom chip.” really brad? we both that isnt quite true…

      1. Wow that Temash or Kabini couldn’t even beat a Clover Trail Atom. I wonder how AMD’s next chip for tablets and fanless notebooks will fare. They’re called Beema and Mullins or something like that.

        1. Well, let’s not exaggerate… AMD’s problem isn’t so much performance but power efficiency… Both Temash and Kabini clearly beat the older Clover Trail in both CPU and GPU performance and still beat Bay Trail in GPU performance, but they consume much more power to do so and that’s their problem…

          The Kabini A4-5000, for example, provides CPU performance about on par with the Bay Trail T Z3770 but the A4-5000 is a 15W max TDP rated part and the Z3770 is a mobile SoC that uses less than 5W even at max performance and the CPU alone uses less than half that even under load!

          So, AMD mainly just has to still be able to offer a truly mobile optimized product that can operate in the below 5W range needed to be usable in fan-less tablet designs and to provide the kind of run times people expect from mobile devices…

          Whether Beema and Mullins (Mullins is the one that will replace Temash) will get them there remains to be seen but they are suppose to significantly improve power efficiency and will be the first to start supporting Connected Standby and other features that signify true mobile optimization… and they’re also adopting Intel’s SDP ratings for those new SoCs…

          Timing is important, though, as AMD won’t have much time to capitalize on those new products before Intel releases their own update to the ATOM before the end of this year with the upcoming 14nm Airmont based Cherry Trail, which will supposedly not only be a improvement over Bay Trail but will supposedly come a long way towards closing the remaining performance gap in terms of GPU performance that Intel still lags the competition with…

          Basically, Bay Trail’s GMA is based on the Ivy Bridge HD4000 (Gen7) and scaled down and optimized for mobile usage with just 4EUs… though, this does provide about 3x the performance of Clover Trail’s GMA but even ARM based GPU’s are exceeding that level of performance… but Cherry Trail will update it to Broadwell based (Gen8) GMA and it’ll only be scaled down to 16EUs for significantly greater GPU performance.

          The heavy focus on GPU performance, though, means less improvement in CPU performance but GPU performance is where Intel really needs to improve and it looks like that’s exactly what they will be doing with that update…

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