New details have emerged about the rumored, super-powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 1000 CPU that is designed to take on Intel chips in the Windows laptop space. Although no official announcement of such a chip has been made, a new report suggests that it will bring the octa-core design most commonly found in smartphones and tablets, to Windows laptops, offering four high-powered cores for performance, and four lower-powered cores for efficiency.
Over the past few years, Qualcomm has gone from developing smartphone-exclusive processors with on-board graphics, to creating chips that are far more capable. Its Snapdragon 835 and 845 made their way into both high-end smartphones and tablets, and joined the Snapdragon 850 platform in the “Always Connected” Windows laptops, too. The Snapdragon 1000, however, would be far more capable than even those and could make such Always Connected devices far more competitive in the larger laptop market.
According to the report from WinFuture, translated by BGR, the Snapdragon 1000 is an eight-core CPU based on the Cortex-A55 and Cortex A76 architecture. Four of the cores would be clocked at 3.0GHz or higher, while the other four would sit at 1.8GHz and would be used to extend battery life when the system is idling or not handling performance-intensive tasks. The chip is also said to support LPDDR4X memory, which could have a dramatic improvement in memory bandwidth.
On top of the new, high-powered CPU cores, a brand-new GPU, known as the Adreno 680, is being added to the Snapdragon 1000. It should have a higher clock speed than the GPU cores used in the Snapdragon 835 and 845 chips. These improvements lead to a much denser, transistor-packed chip. The new report suggests that the Snapdragon 1000 will pack as many as 8.5 billion transistors under the hood.
Despite all of this higher-powered hardware, the thermal design power of the Snapdragon 1000 is said to only be 15w, which makes it competitive with some of Intel’s ultra-low wattage seventh-generation CPUs.
No news has yet surfaced on which laptop manufacturers may be the first to adopt the new Qualcomm chips, but BGR suggests that Asus is rumored to have a new laptop design in the works with them in mind called Primus.
If you don’t fancy waiting for that, here’s our list of the best laptops available right now, and a look at some of the best budget laptops, for all of your low-power needs.
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