Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx was unveiled yesterday Dec. 6 at the chip maker’s Snapdragon Tech Summit in Hawaii, the Snapdragon 8cx promises more processing power and better battery life for connected Windows notebooks.
The Snapdragon 8cx is a brand-new processor for always-connected Windows laptops and 2-in-1 convertible PCs, and from Qualcomm’s perspective, it might seem a little extreme. Physically, it’s the largest processor the company has ever made, with the most powerful CPU and GPU Qualcomm has devised yet. Qualcomm says it’ll be the first 7nm chip for a PC platform, beating a struggling Intel to the punch, and the biggest performance leap for a Snapdragon ever. The company’s promising “amazing battery life,” and up to 2Gbps cellular connectivity.
As the “8″ in 8cx implies, Qualcomm’s new laptop processor has a lot in common with the new Snapdragon 855 chip the company revealed yesterday, although in cases like the 8cx’s CPU and GPU, Qualcomm has tuned the chip up to better leverage the more forgiving thermals. The “X” stands for “extreme.” That’s what Qualcomm’s marketing department wants you to think about the new eight-core Snapdragon 8cx.
Snapdragon 8cx is the first product born of an independent effort at Qualcomm to produce a laptop chip, as opposed to a repurposed mobile platform, to take on Intel in the ultraportable space. The 8cx is also designed for fanless laptops so as to keep those devices thin and light enough to carry everywhere all day.
The 8cx features an eight-core 64-bit Kryo 495 CPU and an Adreno 680 GPU, which Qualcomm claims offers double the performance and 60 percent better power efficiency as what you’d get from a Snapdragon 850 chip.
Inside the 8cx is a brand new graphics processor, the Adreno 680 Extreme, which Qualcomm said is twice as fast as the Adreno GPU on the Snapdragon 850, and 3.5 times faster than the first Snapdragon PCs using the 835 chipset. Plus, the Adreno 680 features a doubled memory interface from 64bit to 128bit wide and is supposed to be 60% more power efficient than the 850’s graphics chip. In all, Qualcomm is calling this the “most extreme GPU (it) has ever made.”
The system’s 7-nanometer architecture offers better overall efficiency thanks to denser chips with lower voltage supply loads compared to Intel and AMD’s current x86 CPUs, which are currently produced using less efficient 12nm and 14nm processes. it also has a ton more cache – a full 10MB between the L2, L3, and system cache.
The Snapdragon 8cx ushers in a new tier of premium Always On, Always Connected computing.
While the PC industry has long focused on peak performance, that’s often been to the detriment of battery life. And peak performance doesn’t necessarily translate to peak user experiences. The Snapdragon 8cx strikes a balance, supporting premium performance with multi-day battery life.
The Snapdragon 8cx comes with an X24 gigabit LTE modem, which is capable of delivering 2 Gbps speeds, at least where there are mobile networks that support that kind of throughput. And where’s there’s non-gigabit LTE, Qualcomm says the X24 can still improve throughput by 70 percent, so it’s not exactly a 5G-ready card.
Connectivity
The Snapdragon 8cx supports 4X4 MIMO and 7X carrier aggregation that enable 70 percent greater throughput at the edge or in weak or crowded conditions compared to competitor solutions. From a UX perspective, such data speeds mean that you can access your files from the cloud as quickly as accessing them from local storage, virtually wherever you are. The integrated Snapdragon X24 modem also allows 90+% of global operators to obtain Gigabit speeds.
The 8cx also have almost the same class-leading cellular and wireless capabilities as Snapdragon-powered phones, including built-in 4G LTE with speeds up to 2 Gbps, 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ad wifi, and a persistent connection that stays on even when your system goes to sleep.
Power
The improvements made to the Snapdragon 8cx’s components weren’t made with just performance in mind. Qualcomm also says it emphasized lower power consumption. The Adreno 680 GPU may deliver twice the performance as the Snapdragon 850, but it’s doing so while using up 60 percent less power. The 8cx will “consume less power on the same graphic workloads than the previous generation,” Nunes said
With the Snapdragon 8cx, Qualcomm is also introducing Quick Charge 4+ for PCs, so you can get recharged fast when you run out of juice. The company claimed that a fully charged Snapdragon 8cx laptop would still have 50 percent battery life after a 13-and-a-half-hour day.
The chipset also comes with Qualcomm’s Aqstic suite of audio technologies like codecs, smart amplifiers and software to offer high-def Bluetooth wireless audio, as well as support voice assistants. You’ll also be able to stream HiFi audio thanks to Qualcomm’s aptX technology.
Likewise, there is support for second-generation USB 3.1 over Type C and third-generation PCI-E so you can connect a wide variety of peripherals. In fact, you can link up to two 4K HDR monitors to your Snapdragon 8cx-equipped laptop. The Snapdragon 8cx includes an integrated AI engine and support for 4K HDR video playback at 120 frames per second as well as support for multiple assistants, including Cortana and Alexa.
The Snapdragon 8cx has won Windows 10 Enterprise certification, the first time the Snapdragon platform has received that designation. That speaks to the 8cx’s security features while underscoring Qualcomm’s intentions to make position this new chipset as the engine for premium devices.
