The launch of Apple’s M1 has rattled the Silicon industry, and most analysts predict that the company could very well turn out to become one of the biggest rivals of AMD and Intel. Earlier, we heard that Qualcomm was testing its SC8280, which would power future Windows 10 notebooks. The rumored SC8280 is reported to be the competitor of Apple’s M1.
Earlier, not much was made public about the chip, but now reports indicate that the chipset could be the first where Qualcomm moves away from a combination of high-performing and energy-efficient cores. Sources claim that Qualcomm might be aiming at high-performance cores running at different clock speeds. Source also reports that the Snapdragon SC8280 is currently being tested with four Gold+ and four Gold cores.
Qualcomm’s earlier released Snapdragon 8cx lost to M1 with a huge margin. Even though M1 was running Windows in virtualization mode, its performance gets reduced by quite a margin; it’s pretty shameful for Qualcomm. With its new chip, Qualcomm needs to match M1 in performance to save some face. The Gold+ cores are reported to be running at 2.70GHz, while the Gold cores are operating at 2.43GHz.
Qualcomm’s new upcoming competitor for M1 has an integrated NPU. It will be able to work up to 15 TOPs. We can confirm that the machines used by Qualcomm for testing feature 32GB of RAM and 14-inch displays, suggesting portable notebooks will be running this silicon.
So, let’s hope we get to see something exciting from Qualcomm, and it will be interesting to see the chip battle it out with Apple’s M1. We also know that Apple is working on M1’s successor and that chip is expected to make its way to the market by the end of 2021.
