The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4, the chip dedicated to Qualcomm computers which intends to compete with the Apple M2, would have a weapon of choice to fight: allowing NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards to be connected to it.
The chips for Windows computers that face the Apple M2 head-on do exist. And for its next generation, which is expected under the name Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4Qualcomm would have a great idea: reserve 8 PCIe 4.0 lanes to allow manufacturers to integrate graphics cards in combination with its CPU. The latest NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 or the latest AMD Radeon 7000 – both in mobile version of course – could thus join the ARM universe. It was the leaker Za_Raczke, spotted by Frandroid, who revealed the information on Twitter.
Leak: update on Qualcomm’s Apple M rival – 8cx Gen 4, codename Hamoa ? pic.twitter.com/1tptCk8ghf
— Kuba Wojciechowski⚡ (@Za_Raczke) January 20, 2023
This information is obviously to be taken with a grain of salt, but the developer suggests that the next high-end chip intended for Windows PCs from Qualcomm, codenamed Hamoa, would offer 8 performance cores at 3.4 GHz for 4 efficient cores at 2.5 GHz. These hearts would be the famous Oryon developed by Nuvia, the company recently acquired by Qualcomm.
The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 could change everything
It could also accommodate up to 64GB LPDDR5x RAM 8-channels, and would be compatible with the new generation of Wi-Fi 7 – with, as a bonus, an optional 5G X65 modem. On the storage side, Qualcomm would arrange manufacturers by allowing them to skip an NVMe controller and instead take advantage of a UFS 4.0 controller with 2 reserved PCIe lines, for up to 1 TB of storage. The chip would be quite close to an Apple M1 in its architecture, with everything you need to Thunderbolt 4 support — via 3 DisplayPort 1.4a compatible USB 4.0 ports — or even AV1 encoding/decodingthe new video compression method that powers the latest generation Intel, AMD and Nvidia GPUs.
Even more interesting: despite these capabilities, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 should retain the Adreno 740 GPU already integrated into the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 that we tested on the latest RedMagic. It would support DirectX 12, Vulkan 1.3, OpenCL and DirectML libraries.
It’s not the direction of the wind
However, it must be recognized: we are skeptical about this new information. Qualcomm is a mobile-first player, whose philosophy has always been to bring together all the components on a single SoC to optimize system consumption. Allowing GPU integration in parallel would not only go against this philosophy; it would also be admission of defeat as for the race for power of its Adreno range, while today it is the standard bearer of video game experiences under Android and one of the most important trademarks of Qualcomm. The manufacturer would therefore take a step back in its evolution, he who has always sought to be independent.
The main argument of ARM SoCs is to offer power for much lower energy consumption. This is what allows MacBooks to be popular today: their performance/autonomy ratio is phenomenal, and has still not been achieved by their rivals still using traditional x86-64 SoCs. It’s obvious: both builders and founders seek to thwart this major commercial argument in the eyes of the general public, even before tackling power. Mobility is the nerve of the new ARM war.
A Qualcomm SoC combined with an NVIDIA GeForce or AMD Radeon GPU is an interesting idea. We even hope to see this development in the future. But as it stands, integrating it on a Windows ARM PC would be nonsense as the platform is not ready. Such power-hungry graphics chips would kill the autonomy argument in the bud, when Microsoft’s ARM OS still hasn’t solved its performance issues with traditional x86 or x64 applications. Windows 11’s emulation layer is simply no match for the on-the-fly code translation offered by Rosetta 2 on macOS. So why complicate this link by adding a remote GPU, which will also have to suffer from this weakness in most gaming use cases?
Precipitation?
There remains an argument in favor of this news that is also difficult to ignore: this market sometimes gets carried away very quickly. And precisely, the best example of this is the launch of Windows On ARM, powered by the alliance between Qualcomm and Microsoft. The first ARM PCs unveiled in 2017 and released in 2018 indeed used the Snapdragon 835 of 2016, yet dedicated to mobiles, while Windows 10 still only managed to emulate 32-bit applications that are now aging. 64-bit emulation only arrived at the end of 2021, five years later.
Likewise, it wouldn’t be the first time that we’ve seen a SoC designer team up with a big name in graphics cards. Samsung’s Exynos division has already attempted it with AMD, although the latter only took care of the GPU part of the SoC. If the Korean giant has accepted such an alliance to try to counter Qualcomm, we can imagine that Qualcomm is also ready to do so in an attempt to counter Apple.
In addition, we recently learned that sales in the PC universe declined sharply in 2023, after two years of sales boosted by the health crisis. In a context of growth, one could have imagined that brands would be motivated to act before thinking, but this is not the case here. If ARM takes precedence over traditional x86-64 SoCs one day, this alliance will have every reason to exist. But as it stands, it’s hard to believe.
Frandroid
Maxime “OtaXou” Lancelin-Golbery
