Hands on with the Snapdragon 8c and 7c, Qualcomm’s value-PC play - whitewarchat

Allow's be honest: We're a little skeptical of the new Snapdragon 7c and 8c story, Qualcomm's latest expansion of its Snapdragon Compute lineup into cheaper markets. But we had a chance to play around with them, and they're…fine?

At the Qualcomm Snapdragon Technology Summit in Maui, Hawaii, the ship's company offered reporters a chance to try out a pair of 7c and 8c exhibit machines. Both of the units we power saw were reference designs, with pre-production ironware.

Miguel Nunes, senior manager of product management for compute products, supplied us with a few Thomas More inside information more or less each chip. The 7c includes a pair of ARM Cortex-A76 "execution" cores, with six Cortex-A55 cores serving every bit the soft-power "efficiency" cores. There's an X15 LTE modem, overly.

The Snapdragon 8c uses four A76 and four A55 cores each, a higher-playacting mix that's matched with a 2Gbps X24 LTE modem Beaver State an optional 5G modem, the X55. If that agency aught to you, that's fine: Nunes same that you should cogitate of the Snapdragon 8cx as a Core i5, the 8c as a Core i3, and the 7c as a Celeron-founded Pentium processor.

Regrettably, the 8cx itself hasn't on the button blown the roof off the PC commercialise. Patc Qualcomm previously secure that the 8cx would deliver Core i5 performance in the PCMark 10 Apps benchmark, it came up way short. (This particular benchmark is important, as IT directly loads Christian Bible, Excel, Powerpoint and Edge, all of which should run fairly comparably on both ARM and Intel-based machines.) Present's our PCMark 10 Apps score for the Microsoft Surface In favor X tablet, which uses an 8cx-settled customs chip, the Microsoft SQ1. It's just not even roughly an older Heart and soul i5.

Mark Hachman / IDG

The question is how much performance the midrange (under $800 operating room so) and the low-end (under $400) market expects, you bet much Qualcomm can deliver. You'll also have to factor in caveats like the Snapdragon's current inability to run 64-bit Windows apps, even direct emulation.

Custody on with the Snapdragon 8c

Qualcomm's demo machines came with one rule: no benchmarking. Instead, we performed a few standard tasks: playing back a 4K, 60-fps video from YouTube, scrolling through a large Excel spreadsheet, and lading fairly intensive WWW pages.

Mark Hachman / IDG

Here are the eyeglasses of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8c reference unit.

There was a trifle of stutter playing gage the 4K video, and that's aft we made sure it had buffered fittingly. (The demonstration room Wi-Fi was satisfactory, but not overly thusly.) I'd say video performance would beryllium satisfactory for a majority of users, however. Scrolling around a large Excel spreadsheet felt smooth, though we didn't stimulate the chance to execute any calculations. The machine felt responsive enough when loading sites like PCWorld.com, victimisation some the optimized version of Firefox and the new, optimized Adjoin.

We had a entirely different experience playing Asphalt 9: Legends, the sequel to the popular Asphalt 8 racing game. Here, the red-hot-paced race done a business district urban center stuttered and even paused for a second or two. I foundAsphalt 9 already loaded on the demo machine when I tried IT; I was told later that the game ran much more smoothly on an entirely different map.

Manpower on with the Snapdragon 7c

The 7c, I conceive, is where Qualcomm's taking the biggest risk. Sub-$500 PCs, especially Chromebooks, dominate Amazon's list of most hot laptops. But Qualcomm hasn't aforementioned anything about pushing either the 7c or the 8c to the Chromebook market, leaving its slowest kick in the hands of PC makers eager to save whatever pennies they can—and a customer base that toilet quickly turn on you with critical reviews.

Grade Hachman /IDG

The system specifications of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c reference unit.

For ME, the 7c and 8c experiences seemed roughly the corresponding. The difference between the two machines, though, was that piece the 8c contained a miserable 4GB of Aries, the 7c boosted that to 6GB—not an enormous amount, but sufficient to get the job done.

That may have offset any performance issues that arose with the usage of the Sanpdragon 7c. Web browsing remained comparatively smooth—but again, we were using the optimized browsers. 4K-60 video for the most part played back swimmingly. I didn't have a chance to play any games, though that's really not the point of double-bass-end machines.

With Qualcomm's Snapdragon-high-powered machines, we've always been of the judgment that you're Sunday-go-to-meeting off remaining inside the safety of apps written strictly for the ARM computer architecture. Go on the far side that, and problems may arise. That advice will belik hold even truer as Qualcomm moves down the food Ernst Boris Chain into respect PCs.

Note: Because Qualcomm would provide certain information only via an in-person briefing in Hawaii, with no alternative venue in the continent-wide United States or by virtual means, we accepted the company's offer to pay for the flight and hotel systematic to bewilder the story.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/398479/hands-on-with-qualcomms-snapdragon-8c-and-7c-qualcomms-value-pc-play.html

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