What is known about the new chip?
According to the well-known German resource WinFuture, which is run by a reliable
The successor to the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 could bereal competition to Apple M1. The journalists of the publication were able to find out about this from internal documents provided by a source from Qualcomm. Snapdragon SC8280 is the working name of the chip.
An engineering sample of Snapdragon SC8280 (the final version of the chip may be called differently) as part of a test laptop with a screen diagonal of 14 inches has already been tested by Qualcomm specialists for some time.
What is SoC?
System oncrystal or single-chip system —in microelectronics, an electronic circuit that performs the functions of an entire device (for example, a computer) and is located on a single integrated circuit.
Depending on the purpose, it can operateboth digital signals and analog, analog-digital, as well as radio frequencies. Typically used in portable and embedded systems.
If you place all the necessary chains on onea semiconductor crystal fails, a scheme of several crystals placed in a single package is used. SoCs are considered to be a more cost-effective design because they can increase the percentage of devices to make and simplify the design of the case.
A typical SoC contains:
- one or more microcontrollers, microprocessors, or digital signal processing (DSP) cores. An SoC containing multiple processors is calledmultiprocessor system on a chip(MPSoC);
- a memory bank consisting of ROM, RAM, EPROM or flash modules;
- reference frequency sources, such as quartz crystals and PLLs (phase-locked loop);
- timers, counters, delay circuits after switching on;
- blocks that implement standard interfaces for connecting external devices: USB, FireWire, Ethernet, USART, SPI;
- blocks of digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital converters;
- voltage regulators and power stabilizers.
Programmable SOCs often also include programmable logic matrix blocks - PLM, and programmable analog-to-digital SOCs also include programmable analog blocks.
Blocks can be connected using a busproprietary design or standard design, for example, AMBA in ARM chips. If the chip contains a direct memory access controller (DMA), then it can be used to transfer data at high speed from external devices directly into the chip’s memory, bypassing the processor core.
What are the specs of the alleged Snapdragon SC8280?
ARM processor will be used in computers,running on custom Windows 10 for ARM. The company is already conducting internal testing of a certain 14-inch laptop with SC8280 and 32 GB of LPDDR5 RAM.
The new ARM chipset from Qualcomm measures 20 x 17mm, while the Snapdragon 8cx measures 20 x 15mm. This makes the new product a little larger than the previous generation.
Unlike low-power Intel Core i5 processors, the new processor will be able to provide better performance and about 25 hours of battery life.
In parallel, Qualcomm is working on a more powerful version of the processor, which could be used in some potential Surface Pro X 2 (if there is one, of course).
How does Apple's competitor M1 chip work?
You can't call Apple M1 a processor - it'sa system on a chip (SoC) consisting of several components that interact with each other as efficiently as possible. It features a high level of integration, which greatly improves productivity and energy efficiency.
CPU consists of eight cores:the first four are more productive and are responsible for complex tasks, the second is characterized by increased energy efficiency and is used when high power is not needed. They distribute the load among themselves, depending on the tasks.
When using heavy software (Final Cut forwork with video or Logic Pro for music production), productive cores are connected. To work with office content, text records and other energy-efficient cores are enough. They are needed, which we will discuss further, for cooling.
The company emphasizes that the graphicThe processor that's built into the Apple M1 chipset is enough for smooth 8K movie playback, 4K multi-stream video playback, complex scripting in Unity and other tasks that require graphics performance.
Neural Engine System is a proprietary systemApple, which is designed to work with neural networks. It is equipped with 16 dedicated cores that can process up to 11 trillion operations per second.
Where will the Snapdragon SC8280 be used?
It will be used in computers runningon a dedicated Windows 10 for ARM. The company is already testing internally a 14-inch laptop with an SC8280 and 32GB of LPDDR5 RAM.
In addition, Microsoft promised to work closely with Qualcomm and OEMs to optimize Windows for ARM platforms.
In 2021, the company is expected to presenttechnology for emulating x64 applications in Windows 10 for ARM. A similar technology from Apple called Rosetta 2 is used in new computers on the M1 chip to run applications in macOS Big Sur, written for the Intel architecture.
When will the new product be released?
When the Snapdragon SC8280 will be ready and the approximate release date for the first laptops based on it, has not yet been reported.
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