At the end of 2021, Qualcomm will launch the first 5nm chipset for Windows in ARM devices. Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3He had already introduced. It used ARM-designed kernels, so its performance isn’t much different from its Android sibling. However, as a result of Qualcomm’s recent acquisition of Nuvia 8cx Gen 4 it may come very soon.
We’ve heard a lot of rumors about it. Most of these rumors were about the company working on a 12-core chip. According to leaker Kuba Wojciechowski, these will come in the form of 8 performance (~3.4GHz) and 4 efficiency (~2.5GHz) cores. The architecture is based on Nuvia’s Phoenix design and will use the marketing name “Orion”.
Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 will be a very powerful chipset. Wojciechowski said there will be 12MB of shared L2 cache per block with 4 cores, plus 8MB of L3 cache, 12MB of system-level cache, and an extra 4MB for graphics.
Up to 64GB of LPDDR5X RAM will be supported in an 8-channel configuration running at 4.2GHz. Nuvia originally designed chips for servers, and these usually have plenty of RAM. For this reason, we can say that it will have plenty of hands on the RAM side.
The Adreno 740 built into the chipset will be the same GPU as the 8th Gen. However, an external GPU will be supported by 8-lane PCIe 4.0 (remember that v4.0 is twice as fast as PCIe 3.0). The biggest difference here is the support for external graphics cards. Compared to Apple, we can think of it as a huge plus.
There will be an extra 4 PCIe 4.0 lanes (also configurable as two 2x channels) for NVMe drives, but 2-lane UFS 4.0 storage (up to 1TB) is also supported as a cheaper option. The chip will also have additional PCIe 3.0 lanes for peripherals such as a Wi-Fi card or modem. The 8cx Gen 4 will not have a built-in 5G.
The wired connectivity options look outstanding. Chip, two USB 3 10Gbps port and also DisplayPort 1.4a with three pieces USB 4 (Thunderbolt 4) supports port. Thunderbolt 4 We can say that the connections can easily run three monitors with 5K + 4K and 4K resolutions.
Also, the Adreno 740 can be used for machine learning tasks such as the upgraded Hexagon Tensor Processor that can provide up to 45 TOPS on INT8. The hard part will be getting support for this on Windows, but Qualcomm is working with Microsoft and Adobe to figure it out.
Chipset apparently 4K/120fpsIt supports video decoding up to and including AV1 (which Apple’s M2 chips lack) 4K/60fpsIt will support encoding up to .
Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4There is still time to come out. It’s expected to launch in the first months of 2024 and is expected to run Windows laptops and tablets (and possibly mini PCs). Finally, Qualcomm promised to reveal more official details for the new chip later this year.