Qualcomm Snapdragon 8180 for Windows 10 on ARM shows up on Geekbench

Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 850 SoC for Windows 10 on ARM PCs at Computex 2018 but we have been hearing rumors about a possible Snapdragon 1000 in the works. Now, a Geekbench listing of what is supposedly the Snapdragon 1000 has surfaced implying that internal benchmarking of this chip could have started. 

The Geekbench listing shows a Qualcomm MTP on a PC with 8 GB RAM running Windows 10 Home 32-bit. While the CPU model is not directly evident, the BIOS listing (highlighted in green) shows the reference 'SC8180' implying this could indeed be Snapdragon 1000 aka 8180. Earlier this week, we reported that Qualcomm is likely to opt for a new nomenclature to differentiate its smartphone and Windows 10 on ARM offerings. The next Snapdragon SoC for smartphones is already in the hands of OEMs and is said to go by the name 'SM8150' while the ARM notebook offering is apparently being referred to as the 'SCX8180'. The Snapdragon 8180, which was earlier internally referred to as the 'SDM1000', is said to be an octa-core 15W TDP chip based on a modified ARM Cortex A75 or A76 architecture so as to be more capable for typical Windows workflows, which the current crop of Snapdragon SoCs don't particularly excel at.

In this particular benchmark, we see that the SoC has posted a single-core score of 1392 and a multi-core score of 4286. Even while considering the fact that these are early figures, honestly, they are not that great. A 10W quad-core Pentium Silver J5005 (2113 single-core and 6368 multi-core) or even the 6W dual-core Intel Pentium Gold 4415Y used in the Microsoft Surface Go (2064 single-core and 4117 multi-core) shows nearly 1.5x more performance. This again, serves to illustrate the shortcomings of benchmarks run under emulation as we've outlined in our Windows 10 on ARM opinion piece earlier. Unless native ARM64 benchmarks are developed, evaluating Qualcomm's offerings with respect to traditional x86 ULV CPUs is akin to an apples to oranges comparison. That said, the Snapdragon 8180 does post significantly higher scores than the Snapdragon 835 used in the Asus NovaGo TP370QL (911 single-core and 3278 multi-core).

The Snapdragon 8180 is expected to be announced during CES 2019 and OEMs such as Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo are already hard at work to release new Windows 10 on ARM devices powered by the new SoC next year.

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