Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4: Details of alleged Apple M series rival leak

Kuba Wojciechowski has shared specifications about the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4, building on a series of tweets that the developer posted in November. Purportedly, the chipset could come in a few variants, with Wojciechowski remarking that Qualcomm is testing an SoC codenamed Hamoa with up to 8 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores like Intel’s Alder Lake and Raptor Lake platforms. Potentially, Qualcomm is testing multiple designs before settling on core arrangements to sell to laptop manufacturers, although we would not rule Qualcomm following Apple and offering several core options under the same brand name.

Wojciechowski adds that the 8 P cores in ‘Hamoa’ can boost to 3.4 GHz, 900 MHz higher than its 4 E cores that Qualcomm restricts to 2.5 GHz. Additionally, the SoC contains 36 MB of L2 cache split into three clusters, as well as 8 MB L3, 12 MB system-level and 4 MB GPU caches. Moreover, Wojciechowski claims that the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 borrows the Adreno 740 GPU from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, which will support DirectX 12, OpenCL/DirectML and Vulkan 1.3 libraries. Reputedly, the GPU will be capable of driving three displays simultaneously, with two running at 4K and a third at 5K. 4K/120 FPS decoding and 4K/60 FPS encoding with the AV1 codec will be supported too, mirroring the Apple M2 platform.

Furthermore, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 will contain a more powerful Hexagon Tensor NPU that can deliver up to 45 TOPS of theoretical AI performance. Better still, the SoC will support up to 64 GB of LPDDR5X RAM clocked at 4200 MHz and even discrete GPUs via PCIe 4.0. Meanwhile, Qualcomm will offer NVMe and UFS 4.0 support, along with Thunderbolt 4 connectivity with DisplayPort 1.4a support. The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 is expected to launch in 2024, giving Apple at least another year of ARM-based laptop dominance.

Purchase the Xiaomi Mi Band 7 on Amazon