Unnamed sources have reached out to developer Kuba Wojciechowski with an intensive set of specs for the upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 SoC. This is a crucial processor for the PC business that guarantees to ship an identical impression for Home windows PCs to that of Apple Silicon within the MacOS and iOS machine universe. The SD 8cx Gen 4 is being developed as the primary PC processor that options Arm cores optimized by the Nuvia group, now a part of Qualcomm. Nuvia was fashioned by three senior Apple execs who departed the Cupertino firm after the primary Apple Silicon (M1) initiatives had been efficiently delivered.
Initially – the CPU.As I beforehand leaked, the best mannequin of Hamoa has 8 efficiency cores and 4 energy environment friendly ones. Qualcomm is testing the chip at ~3.4GHz (efficiency cores) and ~2.5GHz (environment friendly cores).January 20, 2023
Briefly, Wojciechowski said that the data he shared again in November, in regards to the codename ‘Hamoa’ desktop PC processor with as much as 12 (8P+4E) Nuvia Phoenix-based Oryon cores, nonetheless stands. Now he has added that the Efficiency cores are being examined at round 3.4 GHz, and the Effectivity cores at roughly 2.5 GHz. The cores are clustered in blocks of 4, with 12MB of shared L2 cache, and there may be additionally 8MB of L3 cache. Moreover, the SD 8cx Gen 4 design options, 12MB of system cache and 4MB for graphics functions, in line with the Twitter thread.
As ever with leaks, take the information with a pinch of salt till it may be verified.
The intensive leak additionally means that the highest mannequin(s) of Qualcomm’s subsequent gen chip for PCs, i.e. these that includes the complete complement of 12 cores, can even assist discrete GPUs over 8 lanes of PCIe 4.0. One other 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0 will be allotted for NVMe storage use, and PCIe 3.0 is there to assist stuff just like the Wi-Fi card and/or modem. Apparently, Wi-Fi 7 is supported by the upcoming SoC and those that need mobile connectivity may have an exterior X65 choice. Techniques packing an SD 8cx Gen 4 will be capable to assist as much as 64GB of 8-channel LPDDR5x, in line with the current leak.
One other key spec of a Qualcomm SD 8cx Gen 4 powered PC would be the built-in Adreno 740 GPU. This is similar GPU as within the earlier Qualcomm processor for Home windows on Arm PCs, and its helps APIs like DirectX 12, Vulkan 1.3, OpenCL in addition to DirectML – however bear in mind there will likely be discrete GPU assist in top-end configurations.
Another specs shared embrace; the assist for UFS 4.0 storage, devoted AI processing with the Hexagon Tensor Processor, and AV1 codec assist. I/O assist ought to lengthen to twin USB3 (10Gbps) ports, plus a trio of USB4 ports which additionally can be utilized for video out and as much as 5K+4K+4K shows shows.
Wojciechowski estimates that the Qualcomm SD 8cx Gen 4 may imply his massive 300W PC may very well be made redundant by a compact new 100W mannequin. After all, there will likely be nice advantages to laptop computer designs too, so long as the Nuvia group lives as much as its personal hype.
Qualcomm administration beforehand said that the primary Nuvia CPU packing chips can be sampled by machine companions in the direction of the top of final 12 months, with units launching for shoppers in late 2023 to early 24.