Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon G, a new series high performance SoC which are intended to be integrated into portable consolea market that is experiencing a golden moment, although, strangely, the best-selling models do not use chips based on the ARM architecture, but solutions x86 from AMD.

This reality may change with the arrival of the new Snapdragon G, but the truth is that Qualcomm does not have it easy. Ryzen APUs sold by AMD with TDPs between 15 and 30 watts they turned out so well and the catalog of Steam and other digital platforms is so huge and of such quality that in the end ARM-based consoles remained mostly reliant on emulation.

Coming back to the new thing from Qualcomm, we have a total of three different chips that cover different goals. He Snapdragon G1 It’s a chip designed for integration into fanless portable consoles aimed at game streaming, either on premises or in the cloud. The goal of this chip is to offer lag-free connectivity and good autonomy. It will be configured with 8-core Kryo CPU and Adreno A11 GPU.

He Snapdragon G2 it will be designed to shape portable consoles capable of offering a premium gaming experience without resorting to streaming, although of course it will also support this feature. It will feature an 8-core Kryo processor, pack an Adreno 21 GPU optimized for gaming, and have a Snapdragon X62 5G modem as well as Wi-Fi 6E support. The Snapdragon G2 Gen 1 chip will be the first chip available in this family.

Family Snapdragon G3 will be at the top of the range and will be led by the Snapdragon G3x Gen 2, which will have an 8-core Kryo CPU and an Adreno 32 GPU. According to Qualcomm, the chip will offer 30% more performance at the CPU level and up to twice the GPU performance compared to the Snapdragon G3x Gen 1.

This is a powerful next-generation solution, as it will have, among other things, hardware acceleration of ray tracing, super resolution in games and support for 5G and Wi-Fi 7. This chip is not to be confused with the Snapdragon 8 Gen3, because they are different solutions.

There is no doubt that Qualcomm is going all out, but it remains to be seen if these new chips will be as successful as expected. As I said, AMD’s low-power APUs are the most successful solutions recently, although in fairness, the best-selling SoC in a portable console is NVIDIA Tegra X1, used in Nintendo Switchand this is precisely based on an ARM CPU.