Qualcomm is apparently testing its Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 chipset, also known as the SC8380, inside a 10-inch display development device. This indicates that the chipset will be targeted towards 10″ (or larger) tablets and possibly some 2-in-1 tablets and also Windows on ARM laptops. Microsoft may also be testing another Surface Neo-type device with dual screens.
These, of course, will go up against Apple’s iPads with M-series chipsets and MacBook Airs. Which is fitting since the chipset and its Oryon CPU cores were designed by Nuvia, a company formed by former Apple employees who worked on said M-series chipsets.
The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 (codenamed Hamoa) will have 12 CPU cores, 8 performance cores (up to 3.4GHz) and 4 efficiency cores (up to 2.5GHz). There will be an integrated Adreno 740 GPU, which is quite capable, although larger form factors such as laptops can also be equipped with external GPUs (connected via 8x PCIe 4.0), as long as they have the cooling to do so.
These larger devices will also have support for NVMe drives (4x PCIe 4.0), although smaller, cheaper devices will likely stick to UFS 4.0. Connectivity options include USB 4 (based on Thunderbolt 4) with DisplayPort 1.4a.
Qualcomm has reportedly been testing Hamoa-based development devices since November last year. It’s not entirely clear when the first commercial devices will be available, it could be later this year or even early 2024. However, we should start seeing leaked benchmark results before then.
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