Designed For Always-Connected PC, Qualcomm Launches Its Most Powerful Chip Yet: Snapdragon 8cx

Adm Desk Dec 10, 2018

The San-Diego based chipmaker, Qualcomm has unveiled in its third annual Tech Summit 2018, the most power-efficient and most powerful Snapdragon 8cx chip for a computer platform. It’s the third chip in line after Qualcomm’s venture in Compute platform chips starting with Snapdragon 835 and then Snapdragon 850.

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Extreme It Is!

Qualcomm promises Snapdragon 8cx with “extreme performance, extreme connectivity and extreme battery life”. This also promises an always-connected PC user experience, with innovative and sleek form factors and a battery, which once juiced up, can go on for multiple days, all this with the power of Windows 10!

It is obvious that the ‘x’ in the name stands for extreme and can deliver a super-fast experience for PC users. The chip is purely designed with the aim of mobile computing on laptops and would lead to a whole new generation of always-connected PCs in the upcoming years.

Snapdragon 8cx: Power toThe Core

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx is going to be the first chip of 7 nm architecture that would be powering laptops. This is going to be an incredible boost to a new generation of the laptops as 7 nm is the fastest chip architecture till now.

Qualcomm’s started its 7 nm fabrication process early this year and announced its first chip of the same architecture i.e. Snapdragon 855 SoC. However, Snapdragon 855 was purely made for mobile uses and is restricted to mobile devices only. Now, with Snapdragon 8cx, which is even more powerful than Snapdragon 855, Qualcomm has made a grand entry in the laptop segment.

Specifications of Snapdragon 8cx

For speedy performance, Snapdragon 8cx SoC is equipped with octa-core chip Kryo 495 CPU which utilizes A76 prime cores to boost up performance. It is the key component of this chip. On the other hand, for better multitasking, the chip is given a larger system cache. The chip comes with 10MB cache available. Even with a comparison to the closest competitors, Snapdragon 8cx is considered to be 2x faster than the performance of theirs.

In the graphics department, Qualcomm has donned another marvel with Adreno 680 GPU. This graphics processing unit is 60 percent more power efficient than the Snapdragon 850, 3.5 times faster than SD 835 and twice the faster than its previous generation GPU. The GPU can support the second generation HDR playback with doubled up memory interface, increased to 128-bit from 64-bit. This also adds up to the fact that laptops or other devices that are powered by this chip can connect up to 2 external 4K HDR displays.

Connectivity and Battery Life

Snapdragon 8cx is a couple with X24 LTE modem that can deliver download speed as high as 2 Gbps. Regarding 5G, the company has extended support for the same but it is still not known if Qualcomm is going to use its X50 modem (5G end) for this purpose.

This chip is equipped with Qualcomm’s latest processor security. Also, Snapdragon 8cx will support Quick Charge 4.0, which is really interesting, considering the fact for multi-day battery life. You can now juice up the battery is fewer moments and expect to stay connected for multiple days on a single charge.

Starting up with 8cx SoC

Devices powered by the latest Snapdragon 8cx will power up real quick and will stay connected like mobile computing. These chips extended its support with smart assistants like Cortana or Amazon Alexa in addition to Windows 10 Enterprise.

Talking of Windows device powered by this chip, companies now expect their workforce to increase the productivity multiple times with the help of always-connected PCs. Thanks to long battery life and always-connected features; one can now shred the worries of performance or the tangled power cords and concentrate on their work much better.

Availability

Qualcomm is planning on to ship this chip by Q3 2019 for commercial devices. Uncertainty lies with this fact as Qualcomm didn’t show up any commercial devices powered by this chip or came out with a list of hardware OEMs that would we equipping this chip. But the summit surely hinted of talks with local brands in the market like India to launch 8cx powered devices in different price brackets. This tactic is to ensure Qualcomm product’s scale and availability increases in other than Tier-1 markets.

Bottom-Line

It seems India would be one of the countries getting the benefit of the initial lining of products powered by Qualcomm’s latest and most powerful Snapdragon 8cx chipset. But it is surely going to be a long wait.

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