In late 2021 Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, the first 5nm chipset for Windows on ARM devices. It used cores designed by ARM, so its performance is not much different from its brothers used for Android. But soon Qualcomm’s acquisition of Nuvia will bear fruit with the 8cx Gen 4.
As reported by previous leaks, the company is working on a 12-core chip. According to Kuba Wojciechowski, these will be divided into 8 performance cores (~3.4GHz) and 4 efficiency cores (~2.5GHz). They are based on Nuvia’s Phoenix design and will use the marketing name “Oryon” (rather than “Kryo” like current Android chips).
The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 is going to be a real beast. Wojciechowski reports that there will be 12MB of shared L2 cache for each block of 4 cores, plus 8MB of L3 cache, 12MB of system-level cache, and an extra 4MB for graphics.
Up to 64GB of LPDDR5X RAM in a 4.2GHz 8-channel configuration will be supported. Nuvia originally designed chips for servers (it still is), and those typically have a lot of RAM.
The chipset will have the integrated Adreno 740, the same GPU as the 8 Gen 2. However, an external GPU will be supported with 8 lanes of PCIe 4.0 (as a reminder, v4.0 is twice as fast as PCIe 3.0).
There will be 4 extra PCIe 4.0 lanes (which can also be configured as two 2x lanes) for NVMe drives, although 2-lane UFS 4.0 storage (up to 1TB) is also supported as a cheaper option. The chip will also have additional PCIe 3.0 lanes for peripherals like a Wi-Fi card or modem. The 8cx Gen 4 will not have built-in 5G (unlike its Android counterpart).
The wired connectivity options look great. The chip supports two 10Gbps USB 3 ports, as well as three USB 4 (Thunderbolt 4) ports with DisplayPort 1.4a. The latter will allow it to handle a three-monitor setup, 5K+4K+4K.
A few more gems. The Adreno 740 will be usable for machine learning tasks as well as the upgraded Hexagon Tensor processor, which can deliver up to 45 TOPS in INT8. The tricky part will be getting support on Windows, but Qualcomm is working with Microsoft and Adobe to figure that out.
The chipset will apparently support video decoding up to 4K/120fps and encoding up to 4K/60fps in various codecs, including AV1 (which Apple’s M2 chips lack).
The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 is expected in 2024 and should power Windows laptops and tablets (and possibly mini PCs). Qualcomm has promised to unveil more official details for the new chip later this year.
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