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Qualcomm’s next-generation PC chip “Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4” could just be the “Apple killer”

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New information about Qualcomm‘s upcoming PC silicon has now been leaked by developer and prominent leaker Kuba Wojciechowski.

We already told you that Qualcomm is developing an unnamed SoC codenamed “Hāmoa”. It’s unclear if the leaked chip will feature Qualcomm’s Orion core, but Wojciechowski says it’s all about ‘what else but Oryon?  It seems likely that it is a custom chip that uses Nuvia’s technology, which is said to be under development to do so.

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Now, according to new information provided by the developer and leaker Kuba Wojciechowski, the new SoC will be re-named Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 and will provide cellular connectivity to Windows-based laptops via a Qualcomm 5G modem. It also plans to support external GPUs.

The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 performance core is said to run at 3.40GHz and the high-efficiency core at 2.50GHz. The chip with the highest performance will have 8 performance cores and 4 high-efficiency cores.

As for the system cache, each block of the 4 cores is said to have 12MB of shared L2 cache and 8MB of L3 cache. Additionally, there will be 12MB of system-level cache and 4MB of memory for graphics use cases.

Surprisingly, Qualcomm doesn’t seem to be developing a new GPU for the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4. The GPU is equipped with the same Adreno 740 as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. It’s still a powerful GPU, but if you run it on a Windows laptop instead of a smartphone, you may see its limits. However, the 12-core SKU is said to support a discrete GPU via PCIe 4.0 with 8 lanes.

It also has 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0 (configurable as 2×2) for NVMe drives and several PCIe 3.0 lanes for Wi-Fi cards and modems. Also, for integrators who don’t want to use NVMe for boot drives, Qualcomm said it has included a 2-lane UFS 4.0 controller that supports parts up to 1TB.

As for RAM, the integrated controller supports up to 64GB of 8-channel LPDDR5x and optionally offers low-power capabilities up to 4.2GHz.

It also updates the Hexagon Tensor Processor to provide AI performance up to 45 TOPS (INT 8).

In addition, it has two USB 3.1 10Gbps ports, three USB 4 (Thunderbolt 4) ports, DisplayPort 1.4a, and more.

The display output has also been greatly enhanced, now capable of outputting up to 5K+4K+4K (or different configurations with similar bandwidth) simultaneously.

The video encode/decode block has also undergone major improvements, enabling decoding up to 4K120, encoding up to 4K60, and support for AV1.

Wojciechowski says this is “in a few years, we’ll be able to ditch our big, bulky desktop PCs with ~300W CPUs and have similar performance while consuming ~1/3 the power and taking up about the same space as a Mac Mini.” “I hope you can choose something that you can only take,” he said, adding, “The future of Windows on Arm looks exciting.”

If this is the case, we may see products like the Mac mini and iMac with great performance and low power consumption coming to Windows.

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