Snapdragon 8cx: 7 nm PC Platform

We are engaged in the creation of innovative technologies that completely change the way people in the world use various devices for computing and communicating with each other or with the Internet. Now we apply this knowledge in the field of PC. Our goal is to solve the problems that laptop users face for years, including short battery life, slow system loading and the lack of a high-speed secure connection to the Network. In fact, we strive to make our PCs look more like our smartphones.

At the moment, we are developing a new category of Always On, Always Connected (always on and connected to the Network) for laptops, in order to give users exactly the functions that they value most in their smartphones: instant start, permanent connection to the Internet and high LTE network speed, long battery life, device location, slim bodies and silent and efficient cooling. And then we combine these features with high performance PCs based on Windows 10.

In just six months, five devices based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon platform entered the market. On the last day of our Snapdragon Tech Summit event in Hawaii, we announced the release of the third Snapdragon platform, Snapdragon 8cx. It will be the first specialized platform for laptops, created using a 7-nanometer technical process.
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As Miguel Nunes, Director of Product Management at Qualcomm Technologies, said, Snapdragon 8cx will be the most powerful Snapdragon platform we’ve created. It was designed specifically for laptops and is able to provide maximum performance and long battery life. We continue to push the boundaries of what is possible for personal computers, so that you can enjoy the useful features you are used to when using your smartphones.


The first platform based on the 7-nanometer technical process

High performance and long battery life

The PC industry has long tried to achieve maximum performance, but this often negatively affected the battery life of devices. In addition, the maximum peak performance does not always guarantee convenience and comfort for the user during everyday use of the PC. Therefore, Snapdragon 8cx maintains a balance between high performance and long battery life on a single battery charge.

High performance is achieved through the use of a powerful graphics processor, Qualcomm Adreno 680. Adreno 680 is 2 times faster than the previous generation of our graphics processors and 60% more productive than the processor in the mobile Snapdragon 850 platform. The graphics with it are really impressive, because we used 2 times more transistors , 2 times increased memory bandwidth and added support for the newest DX12 APIs. Working in tandem, all these components provide the notebook with maximum performance, but not too much influence the battery life (more on this below).

And innovative changes in the architecture of the platform do not end there. The Qualcomm Kryo 495 8cx CPU has become our most productive Kryo processor. The Kryo 495 is an 8-core CPU with an increased system cache, as well as second and third level cache, which allows the system to easily and naturally cope with switching between a large number of tasks.

How does the Kryo 495 look at the competition? In terms of its maximum performance, the Snapdragon 8cx with the Kryo 495 is no different from the modern 15-watt solutions from other manufacturers, but it does not require active cooling, weighs less and easily fits into the thin cases of modern laptops. But if you compare its performance with platforms that are made in a similar form factor (7W TDP), the performance of the Snapdragon 8cx is twice as high as competitors' solutions, and the power consumption is much lower.

High performance refers not only to numbers, but also to your own productivity when working with PCs and the ease with which it can cope with modern entertainment. Supports second-generation USB 3.1 and third-generation PCI-E buses allow you to connect any peripheral devices and high-speed external drives to your laptop. We also did not forget about the quality of the image and sound, so Snapdragon 8cx supports up to two displays with HDR 4K resolution and work with sound in Hi-Fi quality. Thanks to the Qualcomm Aqstic and Qualcomm aptX audio codecs, modern Snapdragon 8cx laptops are capable of transmitting audio in HD quality to external speakers or connected headphones, including when connected wirelessly.

Both in idle mode and when working with demanding applications, Snapdragon 8cx consumes energy very economically, so a single battery charge can easily last for several days. And when it does end, support for Qualcomm Quick Charge 4+ technology will help you quickly charge your laptop and return to your favorite activities.

Incredible connectivity with multi-gigabit LTE networks

In addition to supporting industry-leading Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless solutions, our platform uses the Snapdragon X24 built-in LTE modem, which supports LTE Category 20 speeds up to 2 Gbps.

Snapdragon 8cx also supports the MIMO 4X4 standard and aggregates up to 7 carrier frequencies, which provides a bandwidth increase of 70% at the cell border or in places with a weak signal or a loaded network compared to competing solutions. For users, such data transfer speeds mean that you can access your files from the cloud as fast as from local storage. A Snapdragon X24 modem allows you to achieve gigabyte speeds when working with 90% of global mobile operators.


The most modern and powerful platform Snapdragon

Ecosystem for laptops with a constant connection to the web and business opportunities

Snapdragon platform already supports many popular applications for work and leisure, including Office 365 and games from Gameloft. In addition, the platform now has native browser support, including (for the first time) Mozilla Firefox. At the same time, Firefox is an ARM64 native application, therefore, it is able to use all the advantages of our 8-core Kryo processor in order to achieve the maximum speed of opening and processing pages.

In addition, the Snapdragon platform now supports new business and enterprise opportunities with Windows 10 Enterprise and many other vendors, including Symantec, VmWare and Cisco. During his presentation, Núñez invited Erin Chapple, corporate vice president of Microsoft, who spoke about these features in more detail.

Modern laptops with constant network connectivity have become part of the “new decade of wireless technologies”, which covers the emergence of the 5G standard, the development of cloud computing, new smartphones, the advent of the Internet of things and many other discoveries. In the future, Qualcomm Technologies will continue to develop the PC segment and 5G technologies. We believe that the commercial deployment of 5G networks, the Snapdragon 855 platform and Snapdragon 8cx will help our customers create new products in a wide variety of industries.