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Qualcomm announces its first actual laptop CPU - Snapdragon 8cx - Core i5 performance

GoodBytes

Today, Qualcomm announces its first actual laptop CPU the Snapdragon 8cx. The x is for eXtreme.  It is the companies biggest chip based on it claimed 7nm process.

The company claims to deliver Core i5 U series performance while running Windows 10 on ARM, all by consuming only 7W. This is compared to Intel's U series CPUs which are consuming 15W. This means you should get a nice boost in battery life. This also means that it is faster than the Y series CPU, a CPU which the latest MacBook Air sports, which is also a Y series CPU.

 

The CPU is a 8 core chip powered by what the company claims to be the fastest one that they build (Kryo 495). And features 10MB of cache.

 

Quote

For the third day of its Snapdragon Technology Summit, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8cx, its third chipset for Windows 10. Unlike the Snapdragon 835 and 850 before it, the 8cx isn't derivative of a mobile SoC; this is built from the ground up for PCs. The firm says that the performance is on par with an Intel Core i5.

The CPU includes eight Kryo 495 cores, which are built on a 7nm architecture, and Qualcomm boasts that this is the fastest Kryo CPU that it's ever built. Indeed, it's faster than the Kryo 485 CPU that was announced yesterday for the Snapdragon 855 Mobile Platform. It also has a larger cache at 10MB than previous generations, which should allow for faster multitasking.

[...]

When Qualcomm says that the Snapdragon 8cx is on par with an Intel Core i5, it's not talking about a 5W Y-series chip either. The company confirmed that this is meant to go head to head with a full 15W Core i5. This is based on single-core performance.

 

The company claims that this CPU was made from the ground up for laptops, it isn't a tweak chip like the Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 which was a tweaked 845.

The 8cx is powered by the new Adreno 680 GPU, which is claimed to be 2x more powerful than the 630 (the GPU found in the 850).

Quote

And then there's the Adreno 680 GPU, which Qualcomm once again says is its most powerful GPU ever. The firm says that it's 2x faster than the Adreno 630 GPU on the Snapdragon 850

while being 60% more efficient, and 3.5x faster than the Adreno 540 on the Snapdragon 835.

 

On top of this, this new SoC features Snapdragon X24 4G LTE modem, the companies latest and faster 4G LTE modem allowing download speed up to 2Gbps (as usually, you need to have the carrier that support such transfer speed, and you need to have an excellent reception, probably have the chip touching the antenna, you know how those "up to" speeds goes).

 

And if you wonder, the chip supports:

  • Quick Charge 4+
  • USB 3.1 Gen 2  with DisplayPort video output allowing two 4K HDR monitors to be daisy chained.

 

The company says to expect laptops powered by this new SoC  in the third quarter of 2019.
 

https://www.neowin.net/news/the-snapdragon-8cx-is-the-first-7nm-pc-chip-built-to-compete-with-core-i5-on-windows-10

 

In related news:

 

 

What these 3 items news means is that Windows 10 on ARM will now native popular web browser choice so that you can surf the web in taking full advantage of the ARM64 chip performance, and not get an impacted by the performance experience due the x86 translation layer.

 

So in other words, if you seek a thin and light laptop/tablet/convertible laptop with very long battery life and/or best in class LTE modem and/or instant wake up form sleep with Connect Standby feature, that is fluid, responsive and fast, a system powered by this chip may, maybe deliver just that. Of course, this is all "on paper" talk. We need to see ACTUAL benchmarks, we need to wait for these web browsers to be ready first, and we need OEMs to actually make good systems, and not do like some manufacture, slap the crappiest eMMC storage, terrible touchscreen, terrible keyboard and trackpad, shitty laptop design from early 2006, and put a capacitor as a battery, and charges you 1k, and calls it a day.

 

 

 

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1 minute ago, Nowak said:

Core i5 performance*

*First generation, grossly underclocked, in cherry picked situations.

 

I sincerely doubt that it can match an i5 in anything that browsing VERY basic web pages, and even then, that's more attributed to diminished returns on the performance the i5 offers.

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Everybody turns to dust.

 

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Just now, Drak3 said:

*First generation, grossly underclocked, in cherry picked situations.

 

I sincerely doubt that it can match an i5 in anything that browsing VERY basic web pages, and even then, that's more attributed to diminished returns on the performance the i5 offers.

Yeah, that's what I'm feeling too. They're likely comparing it to an old dual-core i5-U. No way this can stand up to one of the newer Kaby Lake-R i5s.

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What would this be used in?

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1 minute ago, Drak3 said:

*First generation, grossly underclocked, in cherry picked situations.

 

I sincerely doubt that it can match an i5 in anything that browsing VERY basic web pages, and even then, that's more attributed to diminished returns on the performance the i5 offers.

Actually, the 835 chip deliver impressive performance, and that is on Edge. Reviewers who complains, where running 32-bit Chrome on it, so it was using the OS x86 translation layer which resulted in Atom performance.

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They don't specify which generation of i5......for example an i5 2450M is around 50% slower than an i5 7200U. (Edit: will confirm for myself if I am allowed a few minutes on my Mum's new tablet - going of the CBR15 for the 7200U)

3 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Actually, the 835 chip deliver impressive performance, and that is on Edge. Reviewers who complains, where running 32-bit Chrome on it, so it was using the OS x86 translation layer which resulted in Atom performance.

I don't see how that was possible, when even on bottom of the barrel Celerons Edge manages to be slower than Chrome (talking about one of those $300 Lenovo AIO specifically).

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Just now, I-r0k said:

What would this be used in?

Laptops, tablets, convertible devices running Windows 10

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2 minutes ago, Nowak said:

Yeah, that's what I'm feeling too. They're likely comparing it to an old dual-core i5-U. No way this can stand up to one of the newer Kaby Lake-R i5s.

Given the past claims of "matching i3's" I genuinely believe that the they designed whatever tests they did to come to that conclusion with full intention to deceive people into thinking that Qualcomm can be a viable option outside of the phone and android tablet market.

 

1 minute ago, GoodBytes said:

the 835 chip deliver impressive performance

No, it didn't. It ran a stripped back variant of an already lighter browser, and if we're being honest, gave the same performance of machines running for between a third and a quarter the price. Either an Android variant or x86 variant of these devices would be handily superior.

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Fierce Bloody Angel

The blood is on your hands

Why did you come to this world?

 

Everybody turns to dust.

 

Everybody turns to dust.

 

The blood is on your hands.

 

The blood is on your hands!

 

Pyo.

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1 minute ago, Drak3 said:

Given the past claims of "matching i3's" I genuinely believe that the they designed whatever tests they did to come to that conclusion with full intention to deceive people into thinking that Qualcomm can be a viable option outside of the phone and android tablet market.

Remember when Nvidia ran a GTX 1080 at 2GHz on a stock cooler, in an environmentally-controlled room? Yeah, same thing here. Highly controlled test.

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1 minute ago, Drak3 said:

Given the past claims of "matching i3's" I genuinely believe that the they designed whatever tests they did to come to that conclusion with full intention to deceive people into thinking that Qualcomm can be a viable option outside of the phone and android tablet market.

It did deliver i3 performance.

 

1 minute ago, Drak3 said:

No, it didn't. It ran a stripped back variant of an already lighter browser, and if we're being honest, gave the same performance of machines running for between a third and a quarter the price. Either an Android variant or x86 variant of these devices would be handily superior.

What? Normal Edge on Windows 10

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2 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Given the past claims of "matching i3's" I genuinely believe that the they designed whatever tests they did to come to that conclusion with full intention to deceive people into thinking that Qualcomm can be a viable option outside of the phone and android tablet market.

 

No, it didn't. It ran a stripped back variant of an already lighter browser, and if we're being honest, gave the same performance of machines running for between a third and a quarter the price. Either an Android variant or x86 variant of these devices would be handily superior.

God early ULV i5's are painful. Ever tried using an i5 U450M before? Lets just say that modern dual core Celeron (also ULV) aren't much slower...multi threaded.

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2 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Normal Edge on Windows 10

 

12 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

that is on Edge. Reviewers who complains, where running 32-bit Chrome on it, so it was using the OS x86 translation layer which resulted in Atom performance.

So, is it normal Edge or an ARM variant?

3 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

It did deliver i3 performance.

In a handful of cherry picked tasks where the performance difference of the i3 is well beyond diminishing returns, if we're being generous.

5 minutes ago, Nowak said:

Remember when Nvidia ran a GTX 1080 at 2GHz on a stock cooler, in an environmentally-controlled room? Yeah, same thing here. Highly controlled test.

Besides paying to keep a room cold, one doesn't really have to sacrifice for that though.

Come Bloody Angel

Break off your chains

And look what I've found in the dirt.

 

Pale battered body

Seems she was struggling

Something is wrong with this world.

 

Fierce Bloody Angel

The blood is on your hands

Why did you come to this world?

 

Everybody turns to dust.

 

Everybody turns to dust.

 

The blood is on your hands.

 

The blood is on your hands!

 

Pyo.

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Will wait for I dependant review's. But if the claims are accurate, i see a resurgence of thin and light laptops with battery life for days

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3 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Besides paying to keep a room cold, one doesn't really have to sacrifice for that though.

Either way, controlled test.

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Means nothing if compilers and programs suck. Desktop ARM is on a good path however, and definitely not in its infancy.

 

The parallel I draw is with RISC-V running Linux. It works, but anything outside of armhf APT is gonna suck too. GCC is still being ported to that architecture.

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I'm listening.

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I wonder how many times we will see posts that "Qualcomm chips are totally fast enough for Windows 10 this time, we promise!".

I think this is the fourth time I've heard it, and every time a new generation comes out we get another "okay it wasn't fast enough the last time, but this time it totally is!".

 

Remember when the Snapdragon 850 came out and we had headlines about how "it's designed for Windows 10, not your phone!"? Yeah...

 

Also, be warned. Do not buy Windows 10 on ARM devices. They come with Windows 10 S, which is a crippled piece of shit for an OS where you can't even change the search engine from Bing. Buying a Windows 10 S device sends Microsoft the signal that the horrible garbage business practices they are currently doing is acceptable, which it isn't.

I'd honestly rather have a Chromebook than a Windows 10 S device, which is saying a lot (because I think Chromebooks are garbage, at least for my use cases).

 

 

Anyway, seems like a promising chip and I think it will deliver pretty good performance. I am skeptical regarding the "i5 performance", but I guess that depends on which i5 they compare it against. I have to doubt that it's the 8250U they are comparing it against.

 

 

 

The biggest problem I had with Windows 10 on ARM laptops wasn't the performance. It was the terrible business practices from Microsoft where they locked the entire platform down to make it more like iOS, that is to say Microsoft want total control over your computer. Their end goal seems to be a computer you buy, and then they control what you can install, what services you can access, what do you do with it, etc. Like Apple with iOS. I think that's a massive step backwards.

 

Another massive problem was the price, and I doubt this newer, larger, more expensive chip will fix that. If anything, prices will go up.

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26 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

In a handful of cherry picked tasks where the performance difference of the i3 is well beyond diminishing returns, if we're being generous.

And it was at a price level of an i5.  I would be curious to see benchmarks that aren't cherry picked but i still doubt this 8cx is as fast as an i5.

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23 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

 

So, is it normal Edge or an ARM variant?

Probably ARM32 variant which means for now best case scenario until Microsoft updates Edge with an ARM64 package.

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4 hours ago, LukeSavenije said:

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Considering the A12X (which claims to be as fast as an i7) this honestly isn't far fetched at all.

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If WoA laptops will continue to be priced as high or even higher than its x86 counterparts, then forget WoA taking off. I have no doubts that this Qualcomm is fast but will Windows 10S can be light enough considering that Windows 10 is hit or miss. 

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