Snapdragon

A few weeks ago we saw the surprise announcement of the Snapdragon X series, a new line of chipsets designed from the ground up for use in personal computers. It will be available in mid-2024 and with the support of Microsoft and its hardware partners, it will be a new attempt to overcome previous fiascos and get a viable Windows on the ARM platform.

Snapdragon X Elite

Windowsreport has published an exclusive of the SoC that will lead the platform. His cover letter, always on paper, reads impressively: “twice the CPU performance of the competition with only a third of the power consumption.” According to a source familiar with the company’s plans, the presentation will take place at Snapdragon Summit 2023.

This SoC will be manufactured (we assume a TSMC foundry) in 4 nanometer technological processes. Your CPU The 64-bit version will use 12 high-performance “Oryon” cores customized by Qualcomm instead of using generic ARM designs. Its working frequency will rise to 3.8 GHz (4.3 GHz for dual cores), which is not bad at all for the ARM architecture.

Memory It will be LPDDR5x with 42 MB total cache and 136 GB/s bandwidth, with 8 channels and transfer rates of 8533 MT/s. This combination promises 50% higher multi-threaded performance than competing architectures. The SoC will support up to 64GB capacity. For storage, we see a PCIe 4.0 SSD for the main, a UFS 4.0 alternative and external SD v3.0 memory cards.

New Adreno GPU It will also significantly improve performance over previous models. It will be compatible with APIs such as DirectX 12 and promises a performance of 4.6 TFLOPs. It will support resolutions up to UHD, with a refresh rate of 120 Hz and support for HDR10. It will be able to deliver content to external screens up to two simultaneous 5K at 60 Hz and will support the main codecs: H.264, HEVC (H.265), AV1 or VP9.

It will also include a image signal processor Qualcomm Spectra, with dual camera support (2 x 36 MP); One camera with up to 64MP sensor and 4K HDR video recording.

Very good in connectivitywith Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 and 5G mobile broadband networks. It will support the latest version of USB4 peripheral port with USB Type-C and Type-A interfaces.

Finally, point out the part AIwith an NPU that can deliver 45 TOPS and generative AI models with over 13 billion parameters to improve productivity, creativity and entertainment.

Qualcomm plans to launch the watch in mid-2024 and we’re left operating system mystery. If Microsoft can create Windows that runs as well on the ARM architecture as it does on x86 and is able to run apps and games at the same level, Qualcomm’s proposal has a bright future. Otherwise, it points to another Windows on ARM fiasco.