On the finish of 2021 Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, the primary 5nm chipset for Home windows on ARM units. It used ARM-designed cores, so its efficiency shouldn’t be too totally different from its siblings which might 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 accordance with Kuba Wojciechowski, these will likely 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 and marketing identify (somewhat than “Kryo” like the present Android chips).
The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 will likely be fairly a beast. Wojciechowski experiences that there will likely 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 likely be supported in an 8-channel configuration working at 4.2GHz. Nuvia was initially designing chips for servers (it nonetheless is) and people usually have loads of RAM.
The chipset may have the Adreno 740 inbuilt, the identical GPU because the 8 Gen 2. Nonetheless, an exterior GPU will likely be supported with 8 lanes of PCIe 4.0 (as a reminder, v4.0 is twice as quick as PCIe 3.0).
There will likely be an additional 4 PCIe 4.0 lanes (that can 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 choice. The chip can even have extra PCIe 3.0 lanes for peripherals like a Wi-Fi card or a modem. The 8cx Gen 4 won’t have a 5G inbuilt (not like 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.
Just a few extra tidbits. The Adreno 740 will likely be usable for machine studying duties as will the upgraded Hexagon Tensor Processor, which might ship as much as 45 TOPS in INT8. The tough half will likely 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 varied codecs, together with AV1 (which Apple’s M2 chips lack).
The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 is anticipated in 2024 and may energy Home windows laptops and tablets (and presumably mini PCs). Qualcomm has promised to unveil extra official particulars for the brand new chip later this yr.
