At the end of 2021, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, the first 5nm chipset for Windows on ARM devices. It uses an ARM-designed core, so its performance isn’t too different from its Android-powered brother. But soon his Nuvia acquisition by Qualcomm will pay off with the 8cx Gen 4.
As previous rumors have reported, the company is working on a 12-core chip. According to Kuba Wojciechowski, these are split into he 8 performance (~3.4GHz) cores and he 4 efficiency (~2.5GHz) cores. These will be based on Nuvia’s Phoenix design and will use the marketing name “Oryon” (rather than “Kryo” like his current Android chip).
The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 is quite the beast. Wojciechowski reports that for every 4-core block he has 12MB of shared L2 cache, plus 8MB of his L3 cache, 12MB of system level cache, and an additional 4MB of his for graphics. .
Up to 64GB of LPDDR5X RAM is supported in an 8-channel configuration running at 4.2GHz. Nuvia originally designed chips for servers (and still does), and servers usually come with plenty of RAM.
The chipset will incorporate the Adreno 740 and will have the same GPU as the 8th Gen 2. However, external GPUs are supported on 8 lanes of PCIe 4.0 (v4.0 is twice as fast as PCIe 3.0, just to be sure).
There are an additional 4 PCIe 4.0 lanes (which can also be configured as two 2x channels) for NVMe drives, but 2 lanes of UFS 4.0 storage (up to 1TB) is also supported as a cheaper option. The chip also adds PCIe 3.0 lanes for peripherals like Wi-Fi cards and modems. 8cx Gen 4 does not have 5G built in (unlike its Android counterpart).
The wired connection option seems to stand out. The chip supports two USB 3 10Gbps ports and three USB 4 (Thunderbolt 4) ports with DisplayPort 1.4a. The latter will allow you to drive a 5K+4K+4K triple monitor setup.
A few more tips. The Adreno 740 can be used for machine learning tasks, as well as the upgraded Hexagon Tensor processors that can deliver up to 45 TOPS on INT8. The tricky part is getting support on Windows, but Qualcomm is working with Microsoft and Adobe towards a resolution.
The chipset appears to support video decoding up to 4K/120fps and encoding up to 4K/60fps with various codecs including AV1 (which Apple’s M2 chip lacks).
The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 is due in 2024 and should power Windows laptops and tablets (and possibly mini PCs). Qualcomm has promised to officially announce details of the new chip later this year.
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