The developer and reverse engineer Kuba Wojciechowski posted on Twitter once again published extensive information on the first commercial chip developed by the team at start-up Nuvia, which Qualcomm acquired a few years ago. The chip, touted as the answer to Apple’s M-Series SoCs, could finally make Windows on ARM devices a viable alternative.
Up to 3.4 gigahertz maximum clock rate
According to earlier reports, the SC8380, which is the model number of the “Hamoa” SoC, has at least 12 cores and should work at up to 3.4 gigahertz, according to Wojciechowski. Four of the cores will run as “Efficient” cores with a maximum of 2.5 gigahertz, while the other eight can reach a peak clock of around 3.4 GHz.
Three blocks of four CPU cores each are used, each with 12 megabytes of shared L2 cache. In addition, there is a whole eight megabytes of L3 cache, which all cores use together. There is also 12 megabytes of system-level cache and another four megabytes of cache for graphics tasks.
Up to 64 gigabytes of RAM possible
According to Wojciechowski, “Hamoa” supports up to 64 gigabytes of 8-channel LPDDR5x RAM, which can use “additional low-power features” and is said to run at up to 4200 megahertz. The chip’s graphics unit is the Adreno 740, which is also used in the current Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for smartphones. Qualcomm reportedly wants to offer support for DirectX 12, Vulkan 1.3, OpenCL and DirectML.
Since the mobile GPU from the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in the SC8380 is probably not sufficient for demanding graphics display in desktop operation, the “Hamoa” SoC in the 12-core version also has eight PCIe 4.0 lanes, and one additional graphics card can be used. According to Wojciechowski, most device makers are likely to use the chip in conjunction with an external GPU.
PC-typical support for various connections
Also on board are allegedly four PCIe 4.0 lanes for NVMe SSDs, which can also be configured as 2×2, as well as some PCIe 3.0 lanes for using external WLAN and mobile communications cards. The SoC itself also comes with support for WiFi 7 ex works, although Qualcomm recommends using an external cellular modem such as the Snapdragon X65 for 5G Internet.
Qualcomm has also given its new desktop SoC a UFS 4.0 controller with support for SSDs up to one terabyte in size. There is also a Hexagon Tensor processor that has been greatly improved in terms of performance, which is said to deliver significantly more power for AI tasks.
In order to make the new SoC usable for use in PCs and laptops, Qualcomm also integrates the option of connecting various external devices. Up to two USB 3.1 10 Gpbs ports and three Thunderbolt 4 capable USB 4 ports including DisplayPort 1.4a support. In this way, various external displays can be connected, whereby up to one 5K and two 4K panels can be addressed at the same time.
It will be some time before we find “Hamoa” in finished whips. Qualcomm had recently spoken of the availability of the first devices in 2023 when presenting the custom computing cores used here with the marketing name “Oryon”. In view of the high prices of laptops with the current Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, however, it is to be feared that the finished devices that will then appear will be anything but cheap.
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