Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Chip Announced For Always-Connected PCs

Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon 8cx compute platform, the very first 7nm chip that will power PCs. The Snapdragon 8cx is also a premium chip that will be deployed alongside the Snapdragon 850.

The Snapdragon 8cx comes with an Adreno 680 GPU, a Hexagon 690 DSP, a Kyro 495 CPU and the Snapdragon X24 LTE modem. The chip has four performance cores and four efficiency cores. Qualcomm claims that the Kyro 495 will enable faster multi-tasking thanks to its larger cache than previous platforms.

The chip is designed specifically for “Always-Connected” PCs — devices that are capable of being connected to the internet all day but still deliver impressive battery life.

“With performance and battery life as our design tenets, we’re bringing 7nm innovations to the PC space, allowing for smartphone-like capabilities to transform the computing experience,” Qualcomm senior vice president and general manager of mobile Alexa Katouzan said.

“As the fastest Snapdragon platform ever, the Snapdragon 8cx will allow our customers to offer a powerful computing experience of multi-day battery life and multi-gigabit connectivity, in new thin, light and fanless design for consumers and the enterprise.”

The Snapdragon 8cx also supports Wi-Fi, Spectra 390 ISP and Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 4+ fast charging solution, which is typically only found on smartphones like the Razer Phone.

The new chip is also capable of supporting various kinds of peripherals through USB Type-C 3.1, including outputting up to two 4K HDR external monitors. The chip allows PCs to play 4K HDR video at 120 frames-per-second right on their own display, according to ZDNet.

In terms of audio, the Snapdragon 8cx is equipped with Qualcomm Aqstic audio technology. This suite of technologies comes with support for advanced audio codecs, smart power amps and voice software tech. This means that the chip will be able to deliver high definition audio over Bluetooth connections and improve accessibility features. The audio technology will also support Microsoft’s Cortana and Amazon’s Alexa voice assistants.

The Snapdragon 8cx will fully support Microsoft 365 Office suite on Windows 10. Mozilla also announced recently that it’s working alongside Qualcomm to create a new version of the Firefox web browser that can natively run on PCs powered by ARM-based chips. The Verge was able to try out a beta version of this Firefox browser and found it to be “promising.”

“It wasn’t a buttery smooth experience, but it wasn’t a laggy one either, and it felt like I had headroom to spare,” The Verge’s Sean Hollister said.

Qualcomm said that the Snapdragon 8cx is already being sampled by manufacturers and that devices powered by this chip will start shipping during the third quarter of 2019.