Windows 10 ARM may be a novel and unique concept, but we still are far away from mainstream adoption of this new hardware platform. Thankfully, Microsoft and Qualcomm are still at it.
The partnership that the two companies have formed for Always Connected PCs has the potential to create a massive shift in the industry. However, as the performance of these devices revealed, the two companies have a lot of ground to cover.
Qualcomm, all said and done, is very hopeful.
Although nothing is official yet, we might just have received more details on the Snapdragon 8180, an upcoming processor that is expected to make use of the fresh new ARM Cortex A76 cores.
Yes, this is the same chip that was being developed as Snapdragon 1000.
And it has made an appearance in the GeekBench 4 benchmarks, corroborating the rumors of a shift in the nomenclature of the lineup. This is a low power notebook chip that by the looks of it is in the early stages of development.
This is how its performance numbers stack up:
As you can see, it is running on 8GB of RAM and a 32-bit version of Windows 10, which enabled the chipset to score 1392 points in single core and 4286 points in multicore tests. Quite a distance from the Apple A11 chips that can breeze through to 10,000 points easily.
Or even the shiny new Amber Lake and Whisky Lake CPUs that Intel recently unveiled.
But then again, we are at the very beginning of a new beginning here.
The Cortex A76 is the latest core design that ARM has specifically designed with low power notebooks and Windows 10 in mind. The core not only features a new microarchitecture but also more cache, an upgraded branch prediction and is able to reach frequencies of up to 3.1GHz.
All this said, the success of this new solution will depend on how this design is implemented by OEMs.
But at least we know that Windows 10 notebooks that are powered by this new ARM architecture are inbound, and will hit store shelves later this year.
