Qualcomm dusts off a 5 year old die for the new Snapdragon C

Qualcomm's newly listed Snapdragon C Platform pairs an 8-core Kryo CPU with an Adreno A643 GPU and a Hexagon NPU, manufactured on a 6nm node, according to the official product page. The company doesn't disclose anything else, but information obtained by us can fill in the gaps.

The SoC reuses the same die as the five year old Snapdragon 778G, which could be understood as a cost-saving measure, since rebranding an older die is certainly cheaper than making a brand new chip, especially during this AI boom, where a new mask for a new chip isn't exactly cheap. This also helps them reuse older drivers, since this isn't the first time the 778G has been rebranded for a Windows on ARM chip. The first was the Snapdragon 7c+ Gen 3.

The CPU uses a 1+3+4 configuration: one Kryo Gold (Cortex-A78) core at 3.0GHz with 256KB L2 cache, three Kryo Gold (Cortex-A78) cores at 2.6GHz with 256KB L2 cache each, and four Kryo Silver (Cortex-A55) cores at 2.0GHz with 64KB L2 cache each. That's roughly a 20% clock speed bump across all cores compared to the 778G. But given that the original chip is around 3.5x slower than the A18 Pro in the MacBook Neo in both single and multi-core, don't expect a 20% clock bump to make it competitive.

The GPU is an Adreno 643L clocked at 900MHz, a 40% clock speed bump over the 778G's Adreno 642L. As with the CPU, this won't be enough to compete with the MacBook Neo's GPU with the 778G's GPU being roughly 5.7x slower than the Neo's.

The Snapdragon C's target price is around $300, far below the Neo's. But with an unimpressive CPU and GPU performance, combined with the Windows on ARM tradeoffs compared to the competing Intel Processor N250, laptops built on this chip, such as the Acer Aspire Go, will be a hard sell, given that the 8GB config of the machine is currently being sold for £499.