Thanks to the Windows on Snapdragon initiative, Qualcomm has been dabbling in the laptop processor business for about a year now. And while systems like the Asus Nova Go and Samsung Galaxy Book 2 have their share of flaws, those laptops demonstrated the potential benefits of ARM-based chips through things like seriously good battery lives, integrated cellular modems with always-on connectivity, faster wake up times from standby, and
Thanks to the Windows on Snapdragon initiative, Qualcomm has been dabbling in the laptop processor business for about a year now. And while systems like the Asus Nova Go and Samsung Galaxy Book 2 have their share of flaws, those laptops demonstrated the potential benefits of ARM-based chips through things like seriously good battery lives, integrated cellular modems with always-on connectivity, faster wake up times from standby, and more.
However, even with those pros, both the Nova Go and Galaxy Book 2’s processors were basically chips ripped out smartphones and jammed into laptops, which isn’t really a suitable long-term solution for getting ARM-based silicon in PCs. That’s precisely why while working on the smartphone-derived chips in the systems above, Qualcomm was also preparing its first chip “designed from the ground up for next generation of computing experiences”: the Snapdragon 8cx.
As the “8″ in 8cx implies, Qualcomm’s new laptop processor has a lot in common with the new Snapdragon 855 chip the company revealed yesterday, although in cases like the 8cx’s CPU and GPU, Qualcomm has tuned the chip up to better leverage the more forgiving thermals and bigger batteries found in notebooks when compared to the typical phone.
The 8cx features an eight-core 64-bit Kryo 495 CPU and an Adreno 680 GPU (versus the Kryo 485 CPU and Adreno 640 GPU in the SD 855), which Qualcomm claims offers double the performance and 60 percent better power efficiency as what you’d get from a Snapdragon 850 chip (like the one found in the Galaxy Book 2).
