Qualcomm announces new Snapdragon 8cx Compute Platform for Windows PCs.

The Snapdragon 8cx is the first 7nm chip for Windows PCs and offers a beefed up GPU called Adreno 680 that should be up to 2x faster than the Adreno 630 in the Snapdragon 850. Furthermore, running the same workload the efficiency improved by 60%. Technical details are missing, Qualcomm only states that the GPU offers twice the transistors and twice the memory bandwidth. Furthermore, the GPU can now drive two 4K HDR displays.

The CPU cores should be similar to the new Snapdragon 855 but without the “Prime Core” feature. It should contain 4 performance cores based on modified ARM Cortex-A76 and four power saving cores based on Cortex-A55. With a large combined cache of 10 MB Qualcomm states they can offer the same peak performance of a Intel Core i5 U-Series but at only 7 Watt passively cooled. Clock speeds are not yet fixed, and will depend on the OEM implementation. The first demo devices at the tech summit ran at 2,75 GHz.

The SoC now also integrates support for fast NVMe SSDs and USB 3.1 Gen.2 ports.

As one of the key advantages of the platform, the Snapdragon 8cx of course still contains an integrated modem. The X24 LTE modem is the same as in the SD855 with 2 GBit LTE. The X50 5G modem was not directly announced but later in 2019 there should be windows laptops with 5G, so we guess it can be attached.

For business users, the Snapdragon 8cx now also supports Windows 10 enterprise. Furthermore, the native 64 bit apps for also slowly get more, with Firefox as one of the major new additions.

So to sum up, the Snapdragon 8cx looks like a beefed up Snapdragon 855 mobile platform with a bigger GPU, slightly faster CPU and NVMe support.