While Qualcomm has gone to great lengths for its new Snapdragon 855 mobile platform, the American group has not forgotten its partner Microsoft in the Windows adventure on Arm. Until now, these computers “always connected” under Windows 10 were satisfied with Snapdragon smartphone chips, slightly adapted to the needs of PCs.
If the autonomy of these machines was impressive (up to 25 hours for this Lenovo laptop), on the other hand, the performances often left something to be desired!
Qualcomm is taking the bull by the horns, and during the Snapdragon Summit, the company unveiled the Snapdragon 8cx platform explicitly developed for Windows computers on Arm. Qualcomm does not take gloves off: this system-on-a-chip is “the most extreme Snapdragon ever designed”!
The most extreme Snapdragon ever designed?
On paper, this chip impresses. It is the first PC engine engraved in 7 nm (take that Intel!), able to rival or even improve on traditional “desktop” processors. The performance of the Snapdragon 8cx would be comparable to Intel’s U Series processors (those of the MacBook Pro), which have a thermal envelope of 15 watts – except that Qualcomm’s chip only uses a 7-watt TDP.
Compared to a Y-series processor, similar to the Core i5 of the new MacBook Air, the Snapdragon 8cx would be 50% faster. Graphically, the Adreno 680 Extreme that sits next to the CPU is announced as twice as fast as the Snapdragon 850 GPU, the chip at the heart of the Windows PCs on Arm released recently. It also supports two external 4K HDR monitors, compared to only one previously.
All this without a fan, and keeping the “always connected” aspect and the autonomy of several days, however, the first Windows PCs on Arm equipped with Snapdragon 8cx will only be launched from the third quarter of 2019.
More on the snapdragon 8cx in the following video:
