Qualcomm's New Snapdragon 850 Is for PCs Only

TAIPEI—A Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 arrangement on a flake (SoC) makes for a very powerful, capable smartphone, only when yous use that same chip in a Windows 10 laptop like the Asus NovaGo, you become a painfully slow computer, albeit ane with splendid battery life that's always connected to 4G LTE data.

And then Qualcomm's next project, unveiled at Computex hither on Tuesday, is designed to boost computing performance while keeping the first-class LTE and battery life. It's called the Snapdragon 850, and unlike previous chips from the company, this i is exclusively designed to power Windows machines. You lot won't find information technology in any smartphones.

Forking the Snapdragon lineup into phone and PC versions is significant because information technology allowed the company's engineers to boost clock speeds and accept reward of cooling capabilities that would be incommunicable within a smartphone'south relatively tiny enclosure. The Snapdragon 850's CPU runs at ii.95GHz, compared with the 2.6GHz of the 835, and it has an X20 LTE modem that'due south capable of up to 1.2GBps of throughput.

Theoretically, those gains are a welcome improvement. Even though gigabit LTE doesn't exist in most areas of the Us nonetheless, a modem that's capable of greater-than-gigabit speeds will help boost performance in areas where bespeak strength is weak, Qualcomm said. And a processor that'south a few hundred megahertz faster could reduce the time you must wait for your Windows app to load.

But the beginning generation of Snapdragon-powered PCs sets the bar very low, in role because they are hobbled past software limitations unrelated to clock speeds, modem capabilities, and cadre counts. The limitations mostly involve emulating software originally written for Intel and AMD processors, and it's something Microsoft and 3rd-party software developers must solve before the platform is very useful. Fortunately, they're working on it.

During a demo at Computex, Qualcomm showed off a reference design detachable Windows tablet powered by a Snapdragon 850 running various games both natively and in emulation. There was no noticeable screen lag, fifty-fifty on a Chinese PUBG-fashion game that was running nether x86 32-chip emulations.

Intel also appear some new efficient laptop processors of its own at Computex, including Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake CPUs, and teased that laptops with 5G-capable modems will be prepare side by side twelvemonth. Even if they don't turn out to have as good a battery life as Snapdragon-powered PCs, neither will their performance be hampered by emulation.

The Snapdragon 850 demos were quite encouraging, merely the reality is that the software limitations and the renewed competition from Intel hateful that Snapdragon 850-powered machines will probable get in on the market with a footstep similar to their 835 predecessors—in a trickle, not a overflowing.

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/asus-novago/21403/qualcomms-new-snapdragon-850-is-for-pcs-only

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