HAWAII: Chipmaker Qualcomm Technologies on Thursday unveiled its brand-new processor for always-connected Windows laptops and 2-in-1 convertible PCs — Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx.
Similar to the just-announced Snapdragon 855, the Snapdragon 8cx is built on a 7nm process.
According to the company, this transistor-rich footprint can bring about much better power performance and potentially longer battery life. The 8cx is also designed for fanless laptops so as to keep those devices thin and light enough to carry everywhere all day.
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.
In addition, 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.
The company also made a new octa-core Kryo 495 CPU for the chipset, and designed it to run Chrome better than the Snapdragon 850 thanks to the increased cache.
“With performance and battery life as our design tenets, we’re bringing 7nm innovations to the PC space, allowing for smartphone-like capabilities to transform the computing experience,” said Alex Katouzian, senior vice president and general manager of mobile for Qualcomm, during a tech summit in Hawaii.
“As the fastest Snapdragon platform ever, the Snapdragon 8cx will allow our customers to offer a powerful computing experience of multi-day battery life and multi-gigabit connectivity, in new thin, light and fanless design for consumers and the enterprise,” he added.
Qualcomm expects to ship the new Snapdragon 8cx Compute Platform on Always Connected PCs sometime in Q3 2019 and hopes the new upgrades are massive gains for it on the PC market.