On the finish of 2021 Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, the primary 5nm chipset for Home windows on ARM gadgets. It used ARM-designed cores, so its efficiency just isn’t too totally different from its siblings which can be used for Android. However quickly Qualcomm’s acquisition of Nuvia will repay with the 8cx Gen 4.
As earlier rumors reported, the corporate is engaged on a 12 core chip. In line with Kuba Wojciechowski, these will probably be divided into 8 efficiency (~3.4GHz) and 4 effectivity (~2.5GHz) cores. They’re primarily based on Nuvia’s Phoenix design and can use the “Oryon” advertising identify (moderately than “Kryo” like the present Android chips).
The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 will probably be fairly a beast. Wojciechowski studies that there will probably be 12MB of shared L2 cache for every block of 4 cores, plus 8MB of L3 cache, 12MB of system-level cache and an additional 4MB for graphics.
As much as 64GB of LPDDR5X RAM will probably be supported in an 8-channel configuration operating at 4.2GHz. Nuvia was initially designing chips for servers (it nonetheless is) and people usually have loads of RAM.
The chipset can have the Adreno 740 in-built, the identical GPU because the 8 Gen 2. Nevertheless, an exterior GPU will probably be supported with 8 lanes of PCIe 4.0 (as a reminder, v4.0 is twice as quick as PCIe 3.0).
There will probably be an additional 4 PCIe 4.0 lanes (that will also be configured as two 2x channels) for NVMe drives, although 2 lane UFS 4.0 storage (as much as 1TB) is supported too as a less expensive possibility. The chip will even have further PCIe 3.0 lanes for peripherals like a Wi-Fi card or a modem. The 8cx Gen 4 is not going to have a 5G in-built (in contrast to its Android counterpart).
Wired connectivity choices appear excellent. The chip helps two USB 3 10Gbps ports, plus three USB 4 (Thunderbolt 4) ports with DisplayPort 1.4a. The latter will allow it to drive a triple monitor setup, 5K+4K+4K.
A number of extra tidbits. The Adreno 740 will probably be usable for machine studying duties as will the upgraded Hexagon Tensor Processor, which might ship as much as 45 TOPS in INT8. The difficult half will probably be getting help for it on Home windows, however Qualcomm is working with Microsoft and Adobe to determine it out.
The chipset will apparently help video decoding as much as 4K/120fps and encoding as much as 4K/60fps in numerous codecs, together with AV1 (which Apple’s M2 chips lack).
The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 is anticipated in 2024 and will energy Home windows laptops and tablets (and probably mini PCs). Qualcomm has promised to unveil extra official particulars for the brand new chip later this yr.
