Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 chip has been spotted on Geekbench with the listing confirming some key specs and features of the upcoming ARM chip codenamed Hamoa. The chip comes with 12 cores consisting of eight performance and four efficiency cores clocked at 3.4 GHz and 2.5 GHz respectively.
As for the Geekbench scores, the chip scored 613 in single-core and 5241 in multi-core tests. The test was run with 16GB of presumably LPDDR5X memory and on Windows 11 Home Insider Preview. While Qualcomm itself hasn’t officially confirmed any of the specs yet, rumours suggest that the 8cx Gen 4 will be quite the powerhouse.
It features 12MB of shared L2 cache for each block of four cores combined with 8MB L3 cache, 12MB of system-level cache and an extra 4MB thrown in for graphics. As much as 64GB of LPDDR5X memory in an eight-channel configuration running at 4.2GHz. The chip’s cores are based on Nuvia’s Phoenix design, indicating that Qualcomm’s 2021 acquisition of Nuvia could finally come to fruition.
The graphics are also going to see a big improvement in the upcoming chip. Rumours suggest that the chipset will come with the Adreno 740 built-in, but will support an external GPU with 8 PCIe 4.0 lanes. The Adreno 740 will also be used for machine learning tasks thanks to the upgraded Hexagon Tensor processor delivering up to 45 TFLOPs in INT8. It’s going to be tricky to support this on Windows, but Qualcomm’s already working with Microsoft and Adobe to figure that part out.
Expansion options also seem plentiful on the new chip. There’s rumoured support for an additional four PCIe 4.0 lanes for NVMe drives, although UFS 4.0 storage of up to 1TB is also supported as a cheaper alternative for manufacturers. These lanes can also be configured as two 2x channels. Finally, there are also additional PCIe 3.0 lanes for peripherals like WiFi cards and built-in modems. The latter might end up being rather important as the chip lacks a built-in 5G modem, something its Android counterpart gets.
Last but not least, the chip supports two USB 3 10Gbps ports and three USB 4 ports with Displayport 1.4a. These ports will also be Thunderbolt 4 capable, meaning this chip can drive a triple display setup with at least 4K resolution on each display. It also reportedly supports video decoding up to 4K/120FPS and encoding up to 4L/60FPS in multiple codecs, including AV1, something even the M2 chips from Apple lack.
Overall, this seems to be quite the powerful package from Qualcomm that hopefully will launch in 2024 and will power Windows laptops or even Mini PCs. That said, Qualcomm is promising more details about the chip later in 2023.
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