12 Cores to fight with AMD, Apple and Intel

Today we bring new leaked information about the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4Qualcomm’s first high-performance processor for Windows 11 computers. According to these reports, Qualcomm has already started producing the engineering samples, so new details have been released.

The most relevant of them is that they are making use of the TSMC manufacturing process N4. Of course, it must be taken into account that this chiplet desEsports Extrasprocessor will come next year. Not knowing if the N4 process will be maintained or replaced by the N3. This could make your processor more efficient and powerful in case the initial numbers don’t look very promising.

Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 specs slightly higher than Apple M2

Let’s get to what matters, and that is that information has been revealed about the 12 cores that will make up the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4. We will thus find ourselves with 8 high-performance cores capable of reaching a Turbo frequency of 3.40GHz. These are accompanied by 4 low power cores energy capable of reaching 2.50GHz. All these 12 cores will be able to work in unison at a frequency of 3.00GHz. These cores will be accompanied by 32MB of L2 cache alongside 8MB of L3 cache.

Regarding the graphic section, its top-of-the-range mobile graphics will be used, the adreno 740. The frequencies of these are unknown, but it is logical to expect that they are substantially higher than those seen in current top-of-the-range smartphones.

Continuing with the information, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 will support up to 64 GB of RAM 4200 MHz LPDDR5X, NVMe PCIe 4.0 or UFS 4.0 SSD storage. Additionally, you can also use a dedicated graphics card via the PCIe 4.0 interface. The data is finished with 12 MB cache for the system, 4 MB cache for the GPU, and a NPU Hexagon Turnbuckle capable of providing performance 45 TOPS for the AI.

Other information known

It was also mentioned that future engineering samples of the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 could make the high-performance cores run at 3.40 GHz while the low-power ones hit 3.00 GHz whenever necessary. The one who would presumably be his direct rival, the Apple M2you can run your 4 high performance cores at 3.50 GHz and the 4 low-power cores at 2.40 GHz. To this is added that the Apple processor also has less cache than Qualcomm’s own engineering sample of the new CPU. Finally, Apple’s choice is based in the 5nm from TSMC.

On the other hand, it is believed that Qualcomm is determined to manufacture its chip using TSMC’s 4nm, despite the fact that 3nm will be available next year. Of course, it indicates that they are still not sure about the N4 version that will be used in their silicon. These can be the N4, N4P and N4X, the latter being the one with the most options. The N4X are the most powerful version, providing a 15% performance improvement over the N5.

The first high-performance product we see with this processor is expected to be in the future. Microsoft Surface Pro 9 5G. This would become the most powerful Windows laptop on the market based on an ARM architecture CPU. It will be interesting by then to see how a Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 system performs against one based on the Apple M2.