If there are two things missing from Qualcomm’s big Snapdragon 8cx announcement today, it’s 5G and actual hardware. The chip-maker has been talking up fifth
If there are two things missing from Qualcomm’s big Snapdragon 8cx announcement today, it’s 5G and actual hardware. The chip-maker has been talking up fifth-generation networks all week at its Snapdragon Summit 2018, making it a key pillar of the Snapdragon 855 mobile processor which will start showing up in smartphones early in the new year. It’s also had hardware partners on-stage to talk launch plans.
With that in mind, we’d expected something similar when it came to the Snapdragon 8cx Compute Platform. The new flagship is focused on always-on, always-connected ultraportable notebooks, tablets, and 2-in-1s. Last year, in fact, when the Windows on Snapdragon project was first announced, two companies – HP and ASUS – had commercial products to discuss.
This time around, though, Qualcomm’s presentation was big on its pitching but low on actual product. Certainly the promises aren’t insignificant: lower power consumption from notebooks as powerful – if not more so – than machines running CPUs like Intel’s Core i5 U Series, in fanless thin-and-light designs. However even when Lenovo’s Matt Bereda, VP of global consumer marketing, took the stage, he brought an existing Yoga C630 with him, not new hardware.
5G, too, was conspicuous by its absence. The Snapdragon 8cx has an onboard Snapdragon X24 modem, just like the Snapdragon 855 does. That’s good for up to 2 Gbps Gigabit LTE (assuming you could find a network that could actually serve such speeds up) but not 5G. For that, on the Snapdragon 855, you’d need the X50 modem, which is a separate component.
