Intel may have to watch its back if Qualcomm is able to land its ambitions next year on a big chipset for laptops and maybe even desktops.
Qualcomm may be baby-stepping its move into mobile Windows machines right now, but come next year, it looks like the company will be taking a huge step to bear its sword against a company that could’ve owned it.
WinFuture, which reported on the existence of a Snapdragon 1000 chipset, has followed up with the revelation of a more impressive thermal design power of 12 watts instead of 6.5 watts. That would take it away from Intel’s Atom and even Y-series Core chipsets and bring it up to the lower end of the U-series.
Part of this push of the envelope has to do with rumors that there will be a first-ever socketed variant of the Snapdragon processor, meaning that it does not have to be placed directly on the motherboard. This has implications on the chip’s thermal treatment and size — at 20 x 15 mm it would be much smaller than one of Intel’s 15W designs at 45 x 24mm, but it would be slightly larger than most Qualcomm mobile products.
Maximum memory configurations tested with the Snapdragon 1000, still in development, include 16GB of LPDDR4X RAM and two 128GB UFS 2.1 disks. It’s expected that the SDM1000 will share the 5G-capable cellular modem that will appear on the Snapdragon 855.
ASUS is said to be testing this chip for a device codenamed “Primus.” Whatever that device is, we don’t know, but a recent Qualcomm job listing showed that the company is looking for an engineer to adapt both the Snapdragon 845 and the Snapdragon 1000 for desktop, HoloLens, audio, video, display, camera and the speculative “Andromeda” mobile/desktop hybrid OS project.
Intel and Qualcomm are set to enter into a combat state of uroburos as the former prepares its cellular modems for 5G.
