More hardware news. This time from the processors camp. Been a while since Qualcomm produced a major upgrade for its compute platform for Windows, but we finally are moving in that direction.
Slowly and steadily.
The company introduced the first Snapdragon 8cx in December 2018, built from the grounds up and delivering a massive improvement over the Snapdragon 850. That chip itself was a solid improvement over the Snapdragon 835.
Since then, we’ve been running around in circles.
Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 last September, which turned out to be very much a disappointment for Windows on ARM. It was simply an overclocked Snapdragon 8cx, not dissimilar to the Microsoft SQ1 processor.
It stands to reason that the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 is a more significant upgrade. This much we have already seen from the leaks. But now, benchmarks are showing up on Geekbench.
And the results are, well, better than the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2, as you would expect. Substantially better than the previous iteration, and inching closer to what Intel has to offer. Of course, Apple is still far off, with its M1 chip.
But the fact remains that both Intel Tiger Lake and Apple M1 have been out for a little while now. So, even if Qualcomm ships this processor soon, competitors should have product refreshes on their way.
Interesting times in the ARM space, for sure.
