Qualcomm will release Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 for Windows PCs in early 2022
Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 and the Snapdragon 7c+ Gen 3. These are Arm-based socs with which Qualcomm targets Windows PCs and Chromebooks. The processors should be available in the first quarter of 2022.
The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 is the most powerful of Qualcomm’s processors targeting high-performance Windows PCs. The company has the chips produced on Samsung’s 5LPE process. The Kryo CPU of the 8CX Gen 3 consists of eight cores. Four powerful cores are clocked at 3GHz, while four frugal cores operate at up to 2.4GHz. The cores have a total of 14MB cache memory. The 8CX Gen 3 has a tdp of 9W at less heavy load, but this increases to more than 15W with heavier work.
Qualcomm did not provide details about the cores during the presentation. The company does claim that the performance of the Gen 3 compared to Gen 2 can be 40 percent higher with single-threaded workloads and 85 percent higher with multithreading. The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 makes Qualcomm at 7nm. The Kryo CPU of this soc has four Gold cores based on the ARM Cortex-A76 at 3.15GHz and four Silver cores with Cortex-A55 cores at 1.8GHz.
The Spectra ISP component of the soc offers support for displaying four simultaneous cameras and a resolution of 24 megapixels for a camera. The Adreno GPU would perform sixty percent better compared to the GPU of the 8CX Gen 2. The soc also offers support for 4k display with HDR at 120 fps. Qualcomm offers laptop makers the choice to integrate different modems, including the X65 with 5G support. Furthermore, the chips can be combined with Lpddrx-4266 RAM and UFS 3.1 storage or PCIe NVMe SSDs. It is striking that the 8CX does not mention support for Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 on its specification list. Since these are mentioned in the press release, this is probably an error.
For the Snapdragon 7c+ Gen 3, Qualcomm also reports support for Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2. This is a processor for entry-level laptops and Chromebooks. Qualcomm is having the 7c+ Gen 3 octacore made at 6nm. This soc also offers support for UFS 2.1 storage and laptops with the 7c+ Gen 3 can have up to a display with HFD+ resolution.