Qualcomm has produced some excellent chips in the ARM-based notebook section. It’s Snapdragon 8cx Gen 2 and the Snapdragon 8cx are its prime examples of CPU competency. However, both the chipsets from Qualcomm are not up to the mark, when Apple released its M1 silicon it caught the San Diego firm off-guard and shook its CPU market.
Qualcomm has acknowledged that Apple is a worthy competitor and is reportedly developing an M1 competitor that we will eventually find in future notebook computers. According to sources, the upcoming Apple M1 competitor is internally called SC8280.
It is reported that the M1 competitor is currently in its testing phases, but Qualcomm appears to be making some progress. While testing it was stated that the chip was found to running on two 14-inch notebook variants. One sports 8GB of LPDDR5, while the other sported 32GB of LPDDR4X memory.
The new Chip from Qualcomm will have its die measuring at 20 x 17 millimeters and since it is larger than the Snapdragon 8cx it will have more performance cores. Having more cores increases its chances of competing against M1 in a big way.
But it seems that Qualcomm is focusing on a different approach. According to sources, the chipset manufacturer is thinking of abandoning power efficiency cores and focusing on performance ones. The chip’s performance cores will be categorized under ‘Gold+’ and ‘Gold’, where Gold+ are expected to be ultra-high-performance cores running at much faster clock speeds.
According to sources, the maximum clock speeds tested on the Gold+ cores is 3.00GHz, while the regular Gold cores are operating at 2.43GHz. Qualcomm is also testing out some Gold+ samples at 2.70GHz instead of 3.00GHz, likely to monitor stability and temperatures.
But, Qualcomm will not only have to face against the M1 but also have to vary Apple’s upcoming M1X. let’s see what the actual performance of the chip will be when we saw some serious benchmark score.
