Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Not long ago, Qualcomm announced that the 2023 Snapdragon Summit will be held between October 24 and October 26. As an annual science and technology event, it naturally makes countless technology enthusiasts look forward to it.

With regard to this year's Snapdragon Summit, the closely watched third-generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform will naturally be one of the protagonists, but CTOnews.com feels that Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile platform may be an appetizer, and the biggest dark horse of this summit may belong to Qualcomm's next-generation intelligent PC computing platform, Snapdragon X series, with self-developed halo enhancement.

On October 11, Qualcomm officially announced the new Snapdragon X series chips, which are based on customized Oryon CPU cores and are suitable for laptops.

Qualcomm said the Snapdragon X series platform is based on Qualcomm's years of experience in CPU, GPU and NPU heterogeneous computing architectures. It will achieve significant improvements in performance and energy efficiency, and its NPU will provide an accelerated end-side user experience for a new era of generative AI.

In short, if nothing happens, the new Snapdragon X series chips will become one of the most important highlights of this Snapdragon Summit, which is very worthy of attention.

At a time when the PC market is transforming, friends of Snapdragon Computing platform who follow the PC market on the road believe that PC products are developing in the direction of lightweight, intelligent and networked, and will become an important carrier of personal mobile computing in the whole scene of the Internet of everything in the future. In the recent "2023-2029 China computer Industry Market Research and Investment Strategy Research report" released by Zhiyan Consulting, it is clearly pointed out that micro, intelligence, network and wireless are the main development trends of the PC industry.

And this trend is exactly what Qualcomm has been pursuing and put into practice.

In 2018, for example, Qualcomm launched Snapdragon 8cx, the world's first 7nm PC computing platform. At the beginning of its birth, Snapdragon 8cx was designed for the next generation of personal computing, based on lightweight design, and has the ability to be online and connected all the time.

In 2019, Qualcomm launched the world's first commercial 5G PC platform, 8cx 5G computing platform, which, supported by Snapdragon X55 5G modems, can support thousands of megabit connections, multi-day battery life and high-performance computing on innovative PC terminals.

In 2020, Qualcomm launched the second generation Snapdragon 8cx 5G computing platform. On the second generation Snapdragon 8cx computing platform, Qualcomm's artificial intelligence engine AI Engine can provide AI acceleration experience for PC devices and bring breakthrough AI performance with extremely high energy efficiency, such as AI accelerated eye contact and virtual avatar to enjoy a better video conference interactive experience.

At the end of 2021, Qualcomm launched the third generation Snapdragon 8cx chip computing platform, which is also the latest Snapdragon 8cx computing platform.

In terms of performance, Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 adopts 5nm process technology, and the CPU part has four 3.0GHz large cores, four 2.4GHz small cores and about 15W TDP.

In addition, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chip is equipped with a new Spectra ISP image processing unit, which can provide better autofocus for video conferencing, as well as better automatic white balance and automatic exposure. In terms of audio, this chip can provide stronger noise reduction and echo cancellation capabilities for video calls and video conferencing.

In terms of connection, Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 supports X65, X55 and X62 basebands with download rates of 10 Gbps, 7.5 Gbps and 4.4 Gbps, respectively. The chip also has a FastConnect 6900 module, supports Wi-Fi 6e and achieves a connection speed of 3.6Gbps.

It can be said that since the launch of the first Snapdragon 8cx computing platform, Qualcomm has been driving consumer PC and commercial PC experiences through technology and product innovation, constantly breaking through the boundaries of innovation and leading the development of PC connections in terms of AI processing, performance and energy efficiency per watt, charging and battery life, connectivity, and so on.

Snapdragon X series computing platform, these places are worth watching to understand the efforts Qualcomm has made in changing the personal and commercial PC experience in the past years, so that people can better understand the necessity and significance of launching Snapdragon X series computing platform. It is like a journey over mountains. When they have climbed a mountain, it is time to move on to a higher mountain.

It is worth mentioning that after the launch of Snapdragon X, the previous Snapdragon 8cx series and 7c series computing platforms will not be replaced, but will co-exist with each other, but the positioning of Snapdragon X will surpass the latter and become a new generation of high-end consumer PC platform. For example, if Snapdragon 8cx had previously targeted the mobile version of Core i5, Snapdragon X might have used the mobile or even desktop version of Core i9 as a potential rival. Of course, these are just speculation at the moment, but it won't be easy for Qualcomm to open up a new product line on its new computing platform and aim to "revolutionize the next-generation PC experience".

For example, first of all, in the naming, the name Snapdragon X has been fully considered. According to Qualcomm's introduction, after a lot of analysis, consumer research, design ideas, and listening to PC ecosystem feedback, Qualcomm decided to adopt a new naming system and new visual design for the new series of computing platforms, in which "X" naming can fully highlight the difference between PC platform and other Snapdragon product categories, while a clear and brief hierarchical structure also facilitates users to distinguish the performance of different platforms from the mainstream to the flagship.

Of course, in the field of science and technology, "X" is also a letter with special meaning, because X stands for unknowns in mathematics, symbolizing the innovative spirit of actively facing challenges and exploring unknown areas, and the products named "X" often carry the meaning of radical innovation of technology companies. In short, those called "X" are ruthless characters, such as the most well-known iPhone 10th anniversary product "iPhone X". The restart of the OPPO Find series was also named "Find X" that year, as well as the mysterious part of cool techs called "Google X" that Google focused on, and Space X that carried Musk's dream of emigrating into space.

At the same time, according to Qualcomm, the new logo and platform logo of the Snapdragon X series will show a more vivid visual style in a variety of ways, which will be more bold, lively, concise and recognizable.

Qualcomm believes that high-end visual design can vividly illustrate the significant improvement in the computing power of the new platform and its enabling user experience, and, like the new naming system, can make full use of the current global brand value of Snapdragon.

Having said so much, how high-end will the new Snapdragon X computing platform be?

We know that the Snapdragon X series platform uses a self-developed and customized Oryon CPU core, and it may also be a product with full performance and energy efficiency, especially the control of power consumption will bring us new surprises.

You know, although the past three generations of Snapdragon 8cx platform have made breakthroughs in connectivity, AI capability and battery life, they tend to be conservative in their overall design. With the latest Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 platform, the 15W TDP + fanless positioning is really not enough for slim and slim users who pursue relatively high performance. The Snapdragon X series believes that it will get rid of the shackles and use a higher level of TDP, of course, the details of the architecture are still unknown, and it is worth looking forward to. In short, we have reason to believe that its performance and energy efficiency will be a new progress compared with the current 8cx computing platform.

In addition, the Snapdragon X series computing platform is expected to bring a whole new experience in AI. If nothing happens, this year's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile platform should be equipped with the ninth generation of AI Engine, and the new Snapdragon X computing platform will also be equipped with the latest ninth generation AI Engine for better AI computing.

Moreover, considering that the development of generative AI is in the ascendant, Snapdragon X series computing platform will also be specially optimized for the application scenarios of spanning AI, so as to bring everyone an accelerated terminal-side AI user experience.

At present, Qualcomm has been able to conduct full-stack AI research and optimization for applications, neural network models, algorithms, software and hardware. In June last year, Qualcomm launched a leading software stack product specifically for edge-side AI, Qualcomm AI software stack, with excellent terminal-side AI technology, using heterogeneous computing methods to accelerate terminal-side AI using hardware and software to jointly develop the most optimized solution.

In the first half of this year, Qualcomm implemented the world's first Stable Diffusion terminal-side demonstration on Android phones, completing 20-step reasoning in 15 seconds to generate detailed images, so can the terminal-side AI model experience similar to Stable Diffusion be brought to the PC platform through Snapdragon X computing platform? And Qualcomm has previously said that it is planning to support models with parameters as high as 10 billion, will it implement the support of 10 billion parameter models on Snapdragon X series platforms? All these are very much to look forward to.

Last year, Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm's CEO and president, said: "based on our current accumulation of relevant designs, the Windows PC with Snapdragon processor will reach an inflection point in 2024."

CTOnews.com believes that the inflection point here should mean that the comprehensive performance of PC products in terms of lightness, performance and energy efficiency, intelligence and networking has risen to a new stage. Now, at the end of 2023, the new Snapdragon X series computing platform comes out of the sky, which really makes us look forward to the performance of Snapdragon platform Windows PC next year. At the same time, we also expect that Snapdragon X computing platform can really lead the progress of the mobile PC industry and let technological innovation revolutionize our PC experience.

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