Qualcomm today announced the Snapdragon 8cx, its third chipset for Windows 10. Unlike the previous two efforts before it, this one is built from the ground up for PCs.
And is not derivative of a mobile SoC like the Snapdragon 835 and 850 before it used to be.
The company claims that the performance should be on par with an Intel Core i5, which is encouraging news as the previous two efforts that brought Windows to the ARM platform were found to be terribly lacking when it comes to computing prowess.
With eight Kryo 495 cores built on a 7nm architecture, this is the fastest Kryo CPU that Qualcomm has ever built. It also comes packing a larger 10MB of cache that should allow for faster multitasking.
Alex Katouzian, senior vice president and general manager of mobile for Qualcomm Technologies:
“With performance and battery life as our design tenets, we’re bringing 7nm innovations to the PC space, allowing for smartphone-like capabilities to transform the computing experience. As the fastest Snapdragon platform ever, the Snapdragon 8cx will allow our customers to offer a powerful computing experience of multi-day battery life and multi-gigabit connectivity, in new thin, light and fanless design for consumers and the enterprise.”
On the graphics side of things, Qualcomm once again impresses with its most powerful GPU ever.
The Adreno 680 GPU is said to be twice as fast as the Adreno 630 on the Snapdragon 850, while being an impressive 60% more efficient. It is also 3.5 times as fast as the Adreno 540 on the Snapdragon 835, which should serve well for its gaming chops.
On the connectivity side of thing, the new Snapdragon X24 4G LTE modem supports download speeds of up to 2Gbps and upload speeds of 316Mbps for lightning fast networking.
Important, because cellular connectivity is one of the key value propositions of the Windows 10 on ARM platform alongside much longer battery life and instant wake up.
Unfortunately, if all this sounds exciting, you will not be able to get your hands on a Snapdragon 8cx device just yet. PCs with this new Compute Platform are expected to ship in the third quarter of 2019, as a fair amount of work remains, both on the hardware and software side of things.
But the future sure is thrilling!
