Qualcomm has introduced the Snapdragon X70, a 4nm 5G modem for laptops. It follows last year’s Snapdragon X65 and refines its capabilities — artificial intelligence is said to increase the effective data rates, latencies and efficiency compared to the previous baseband.
Purely on paper, the Snapdragon X65 and Snapdragon X70 do not differ in terms of peak values — both achieve 10 GBit/s downstream and 3.5 GBit/s upstream.
The Snapdragon X70 supports all 5G bands used worldwide in the frequency range from 600 MHz to 41 GHz. In the Sub-6 spectrum, which is important in this country, the range from 600 MHz to 6 GHz is supported, while the mmWave spectrum ranges from 24 GHz to 41 GHz. Quad carrier aggregation includes FDD and TDD, making the Snapdragon X70 more flexible.
For the first time, Qualcomm is also integrating a block for artificial intelligence, which is intended to improve the performance of the 5G modem. Specifically, this affects the channel states, beam management, network selection and adaptive antenna tuning.
Depending on the position in the radio cell, data throughput should increase by between 16 and 24 percent, and mmWave coverage should improve by 28 percent. Qualcomm expects the first devices with the Snapdragon X70 to be in late 2022, with samples for partners starting in the first half of the year.
The new 5G modem is combined with the well-known QET7100, an envelope tracker. The FastConnect 7800 for Bluetooth 5.3 and Wi-Fi 6E as well as Wi-Fi 7 is new as an optional 14 nm chip — it supports top speeds of up to 5.8 Gbit/s thanks to 4K QAM and 320 MHz channel width, and the FastConnect 7800 can save between 30 and 50 percent of energy when listening to music via Bluetooth LE audio.
