ARM chips for PCs continue to gain market once Apple has demonstrated the great possibilities of an architecture that is pushing hard on x86, the great dominator in world computing for the last three decades.
Qualcomm wants to take advantage of the pull and catch up on these kinds of chips. The latest attempts under the alliance with Microsoft for ‘Windows on ARM’ have not worked, both because of the operating system and the lack of well-supported software, as well as poor processor performance.
Something that the semiconductor manufacturer wants to change with the new generation of chips that it has presented this week, the Snapdragon 8cx and Snapdragon 7c +. The new generation 8 will offer a process performance increase of up to 85% compared to the previous generation, while the improvement in graphics performance is estimated at 60%.
To do this, the new chip has Kryo 695 CPU cores (four ARM Cortex-X1 and four Cortex-A78 cores) and an integrated Adreno 69x graphics. Additionally, we also find a video processing unit and a display unit.
It has also improved the Spectra image signal processor that offers support for a 4K HDR camera, up to 4 additional sensors, faster zoom handling and other improvements in video conferencing tasks. The artificial intelligence engine is also new and offers a performance of 29 TOPS.
The section of connectivity receives news of interest, with Qualcomm’s FastConnect 6900 wireless system, support for WiFi 6E and a Qualcomm modem for 5G up to the most powerful of the series, the Snapdragon X65 5G that will offer mobile data download speeds of up to 10 Gbps. Another section that has stood out in ARMs for PCs has been the autonomy and Qualcomm promises more than 25 hours of use.
Qualcomm’s new PC ARMs are expected to are available in the first quarter of 2022. A notable advance to get closer to what the new Macs offer. Of course, the software section is missing and here Microsoft has it more complicated than Apple. It does not have the control of soft-hard and the Windows ecosystem is huge and more diverse than the Mac’s. It will be easier for Google and its partners to use them on Chromebooks.
