The new Qualcomm SoC for Windows notebooks and low-end Chromebooks is called Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 — under $ 400 and integrated LTE connectivity.
As the name implies, this Gen 2 represents a small improvement on the previous Snapdragon 7c announced in 2019. With two high-performance Kryo 468 (Cortex-A76) cores and six more efficient Kryo 468 Silver (Cortex-A55) cores now capable of going up to a frequency of 2.55 GHz compared to the previous 2.4 GHz.
The company claims to offer 10% faster performance than “most competing platforms.” The company also claims that the 7c Gen 2 can deliver up to twice the battery life compared to its competitors.
Apart from the faster processor, the 7c Gen 2 is more or less the same Qualcomm chip announced in 2019. The Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 continues to support dual-channel (32-bit) LPDDR4X-2133 memory. It has an Adreno 618 GPU and integrated with a Snapdragon X15 LTE modem. The latter allows the 7c Gen 2 to reach theoretical download speeds of 800 Mbps.
Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 confronts the market with Intel Jasper Lake solutions, 10-nanometer processors based on Tremont architecture introduced earlier this year. The first products with Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 SoCs will arrive this summer, with China’s Lenovo leading the way and other OEMs. The new chip joins the existing offer formed by the Snapdragon 8c and 8cx Gen 2.
Also, during the summer, Qualcomm and Microsoft will make available to software developers — through the Microsoft Store — a “Snapdragon Developer Kit for Windows 10 “in order to facilitate the creation and/or porting of 64-bit apps on Windows 10 on ARM.
