The tiny processor that packs a BIG punch!
It’s been a year since we’ve seen the first devices running Windows on Snapdragon, and Qualcomm is continuing its quest to make a capable ARM-based processor for PCs. On the third of its three-day tech summit in Hawaii today, the company unveiled the Snapdragon 8cx. It’s Qualcomm’s second made-for-Windows chipset, but one that the company says offers significantly better performance and energy efficiency. So much more, in fact, that the “x” in 8cx stands for “extreme.”
Like the just-announced Snapdragon 855, the Snapdragon 8cx is built on a 7nm process — a first in the compute space, according the company. This transistor-rich footprint should 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. 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.”
