Qualcomm is evidently developing a competitor product to the Apple M1
No time right now?
Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon is supposed to put performance before running time. In the duo with Windows 10 on ARM, competition to Apple’s M1 is to be expected.
After Apple was able to convince most people of the advantages of the ARM platform with the M1 chip, Microsoft’s Windows 10-on-ARM platform with Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx no longer looks up-to-date. This is also confirmed by Golem.de in the test of a Samsung Galaxy Book S with the SoC. It is slower than the Intel model, which is also due to the emulation layer in Windows 10-on-ARM. The company is probably already working on the next generation. Winfuture appropriate documents are available.
The successor has the working title SC8280 and, in contrast to the 8cx, should concentrate more on performance than on the longest possible runtimes. It seems that Qualcomm is therefore replacing the four energy-efficient Cortex-A55 cores and powerful A77 cores with Gold and Gold +.
The company retains the concept of the dual quad-core solution: four gold plus cores are to clock at 2.7 gigahertz, while four further gold cores are at 2.43 gigahertz. The change between the energy-saving and more powerful instances should therefore be less noticeable due to the smaller frequency differences. This was previously a problem with the Snapdragon 8cx.
Windows Latest also speaks of a revised NPU, a co-processor that is supposed to take over machine learning tasks. For example, tasks such as live translations, image recognition or text suggestions should be able to be calculated more quickly.
Microsoft also needs to develop further
Although further details about the upcoming processor are not yet known, one thing is clear: Qualcomm’s chip will want to compete with Apple Silicon. However, it is also up to Microsoft to develop a better optimized virtualization layer so that Windows 10 loses less performance on ARM chips.
The company has been working since the end of 2020 about 64-bit emulation for Windows 10. A completely new operating system, Windows 10X, is also in the works, which will concentrate on mobile devices such as tablets and later also dual-screen hardware with an ARM chip.
The author of the article is Oliver Nickel.
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