In December at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Technology Summit, the company announced the Snapdragon 8cx, the first 7nm mobile PC chipset. Meant to compete with a 15W Intel Core i5, it's the first chipset that Qualcomm has made that's built from the ground up for Windows 10 PCs.
Today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the company announced a new SKU of the chipset, which still won't ship until later this year. Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 8cx 5G today, a variant of the 8cx that comes paired with the Snapdragon X55 5G modem.
Announced just last week, the Snapdragon X55 is Qualcomm's second-generation 5G modem, promising speeds of up to 7Gbps. The chip supports 4G LTE speeds of up to 2.5Gbps, which also means that devices won't need separate 4G and 5G modems. It's worth noting that flagship smartphones shipping this year with a Snapdragon 855 chipset will still be using the Snapdragon X50 for 5G and the Snapdragon X24 for 4G LTE.
“Our platforms were the first to bring gigabit, and now multi-gigabit LTE to the PC,” said Alex Katouzian, senior vice president and general manager, Mobile, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. “We also brought multi-day battery life to the PC, and with the Snapdragon 8cx 5G compute platform, we innovate once again to bring the best of our computing and connectivity technologies into a single platform to modernize the enterprise.”
The Snapdragon 8cx CPU includes eight Kryo 495 cores, which is the fastest Kryo CPU that Qualcomm has ever made, even faster than the one in the Snapdragon 855. It also has an Adreno 680 GPU, which is twice as fast as the Adreno 630 in the Snapdragon 850.
Interestingly, when the Snapdragon 8cx was announced, there was no mention of 5G. However, Qualcomm was not shy about saying that it will support 5G, even getting on stage and promising 5G PCs before the end of the year. In our interview with Qualcomm's Miguel Nunes, he also confirmed it.
Qualcomm says that the Snapdragon 8cx 5G is already sampling to customers, and it will be available in the second half of this year, so the timing should be about the same as the regular Snapdragon 8cx.
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