Shulou(Shulou.com)05/31 Report--

Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 processor platform for PCs on Wednesday, claiming the chip will deliver 85 percent better performance than the previous generation.

That's good, because as office work life shifts to home desks and sofas, the pandemic severely undercuts the Snapdragon-powered PC's value proposition--long battery life and always-on mobile connectivity. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2, launched this spring, has similar performance to the original Microsoft Surface Laptop, but much higher graphics processing power.

Qualcomm's aggressive performance predictions for Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 are based on its new process scale-down-from Gen 2's 7nm to Gen 3's new, aggressive 5nm node. Qualcomm believes the chip will deliver more than 85% CPU performance and 60% GPU performance improvement compared to the previous generation. "We're focused on really driving these features and capabilities in the mainstream PC space," Miguel Nunes, Qualcomm's vice president of product management, said in a briefing with reporters.

A chart shows the performance of the second generation Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 and the original 8cx. Qualcomm believes its performance will be about 80% better than the 8cx Gen 2. If true, the benchmark will perform at 3,508, slightly below the 10th generation Intel Core chip.

Mark Hackman/ IDG

Qualcomm also announced the Snapdragon 7c+ Gen 3 computing platform for entry-level PCs and Chromebooks. It is built on a 6 nm process and offers up to 60% CPU performance improvement and up to 70% GPU performance improvement. Like Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, 7c+ will also support 5G.

Qualcomm didn't reveal the clock speed of the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, nor did it reveal the names of its integrated Kryo CPU, Adreno GPU or Hexagon DSP-a move attributed to the new naming scheme adopted for its mobile Snapdragon 8 processor. We do know that the chip will support LPDDR4X-4266 memory, NVMe SSD, a pair of 4K external displays via DisplayPort, and 4K video playback in hardware. Qualcomm says games can run at speeds up to 1080p at 120Hz.

According to Qualcomm's Nunes, Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 does not include any "efficiency" cores, only "performance" and "main" cores. Flow reduction offers opportunities to save power, improve performance, or a combination of both; for Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, Qualcomm decided to maximize performance.

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