Qualcomm has not only taken advantage of the Snapdragon Summit 2021 to present its Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 for mobile phones and Snapdragon G3x Gen 1 for handhelds. The American company also wanted to unveil the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 and Snapdragon 7c+ Gen 3 — SoCs to power future Windows 11-on ARM laptops.
Already dated for arrival in the next year, the upcoming Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 will offer up to 40% higher single-thread and 85% higher multithreading performance than the current generation, while the Snapdragon 7c+ Gen 3 will offer similar improvements over the entry-level chip of the year.
In short, Snapdragon 8cx is designed for higher performance Windows systems, twhile Snapdragon 7c+ is designed for Chromebooks and entry-level Windows PCs.
Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 is manufactured in a 5-nanometer process, and Qualcomm states that the integrated Adreno graphics unit should achieve a 60% higher performance than the previous iGPU.
The performance for artificial intelligence in the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 should amount to 29 TOPS; so far, it was 9 TOPS. An external Snapdragon X65 is used as the 5G modem, and a Fastconnect 6900 chip for WiFi 6E is also included; nine PCIe Gen 3 lanes are available for this. In terms of security, the chip integrates the Pluton approach from Microsoft, as well as the CCA realms from ARMv9.
The Snapdragon 7c+ Gen 3 was announced as a 6 nm design, it should have a 40% higher CPU, and 35% increased iGPU performance compared to the Snapdragon 7c.
Lenovo and Microsoft have announced as the first partners that they want to use the Snapdragon SoCs. Both the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 and the Snapdragon 7c+ Gen 3 will hit the market in early 2022.
