Qualcomm Refreshes Snapdragon 7c Chip for PCs and Chromebooks

In late 2019, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8c and 7c, a pair of affordable chips for always-on Windows 10 PCs and Chromebooks. Today, the company is updating the latter of those two SoCs to improve performance. Engadget: The Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 features a Kyro CPU that can achieve clock speeds of up to 2.55GHz. The company claims it delivers 10 percent faster performance than "most competing platforms." Qualcomm likely has processors from Intel's Gemini Lake family in mind here. The company also claims the 7c Gen 2 can deliver up to two times the battery life of its competitors. Outside of the faster CPU, the 7c Gen 2 is more or less the same chip Qualcomm announced in 2019. It features an Adreno 618 GPU and Snapdragon X15 LTE modem. The latter allows the 7c Gen 2 to hit theoretical download speeds of 800 Mbps. As with its predecessor, the chip is designed for education and price-conscious customers. According to Qualcomm, we can expect the first Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 laptops to arrive this summer, with the first models coming from Lenovo.

so very informative

[luvirini]

"most competing platforms." is one of those marketing terns that are meaningless..

As you can define most and what is competing in any way you want.

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[larwe]

Definitely. I have to wonder how much these chips matter, though. Windows-on-ARM is not having a rocketlike takeoff.

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[iggymanz]

yes it is, a Musk rocket takeoff.

Musk rockets fall down go boom.

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[Anubis IV]

Honestly, the most interesting thing to happen to Windows 10 on ARM since its launch could well be the debut of Apple Silicon. What previously was nothing more than yet another forgotten version of Windows, destined for the trash bin, is now getting a LOT more attention thanks to Mac-using software developers demanding better of the only version of Windows that has any hope of running on their hardware in the immediate future.

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[larwe]

I was musing over that. But I don't see a lot of hope for it, honestly. A big part of why people run Windows is the back software catalog that will never, ever get ported to ARM. And emulation is ... meh. Apple can just wave their magic wand and whisper "Courage!" and deprecate anything, and people keep buying their hardware. And they make the money on the hardware, not the OS.

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[Anubis IV]

Having not used Windows 10 on ARM, I can't speak to its emulation of x86 apps, but I have used Rosetta (both 1 and 2), and they're incredibly impressive. Of course, it helped that in each case Apple was transitioning from a significantly slower chip architecture to a significantly speedier one. Making a huge performance jump helped cover any emulation slowness. Microsoft has no such cover because they're generally moving from a speedier platform to a slower one. Even in the case of Windows 10 on ARM running

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[drinkypoo]

Seeing Intel dethroned by AMD in the PC space has been very nice these last few years, and I'd love to see it continue with ARM, if only so that it forces Intel to actually start competing again. They have smart people there. I earnestly hope they get their act together so they can put pressure on everyone else.

Intel's problem is that while they may have smart people, they clearly don't have anyone smart enough to fix their speculative execution problems, so they just keep band-aiding them. Whoever understands that part of their architecture must have moved on long since.

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[bn-7bc]

well of course not, windows on arm negates windows largest selling point: support for legacy x86 windows software that is to hard/expensive or even impossible to port to other platforms. Unless windows on arm can emulate x86 arc that is

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[larwe]

Windows on ARM _can_ emulate x86 Windows. It just doesn't work very well. https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-on-arm-this-is-how-well-64-bit-emulation-is-working/ [techrepublic.com] and honestly there are so many nuances undeneath the raw emulation layer that I think it will never be a seamless and "perfect" experience.

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[Gravis Zero]

"most competing platforms." is one of those marketing terns that are meaningless..

As you can define most and what is competing in any way you want.

This is a paid fluff piece meant to promote Qualcomm, what did you expect?

affordable?

[algaeman]

affordable is yet another of those terms. Affordable to who? I think a chip competing with Intel Atom should be $10. Is that what Qualcomm means?

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[bn-7bc]

is the intel atop an soc or just a cpu?

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[bn-7bc]

probably, the more important question is: can they get drivers for all the other hw in that soc,

Apple's low energy processors

[hdyoung]

are in the process of leaving everyone else in the dust, leaving the other players to squabble over said dust.

But then, maybe I'm ignorant about processor performance. It's possible. Seems to me like the M1 and the obviously-upcoming family of Apple processors based on it are looking like a pretty major jump forward in terms of efficient+fast computing. Am I wrong?