Qualcomm’s next Snapdragon latest chip has just surfaced, but they aren’t for your phone

In addition to producing some of the greatest Chromebooks and laptops, Qualcomm is a leader in the development of ARM laptop silicon. Qualcomm’s smartphone chips are excellent. Yet, several of its products needed to be upgraded. In the latter half of 2021, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 laptop processor. We already need a replacement because the Snapdragon 845 Gen 4 has been the subject of months’ worth of speculation. A recent field test of an engineering sample may have revealed important information regarding the future chip as well as some (perhaps) discouraging information.

As per the results that were posted via Tom’s Hardware, an engineering sample of “Snapdragon 8CX Next Gen” was benchmarked using GeekBench 5. Benchmarks typically provide only very flimsy evidence of a chip’s performance and likelihood of being released as evaluated. Yet, the device’s 8+4 hybrid core configuration matches the core layout that has previously leaked for this chip; earlier speculations suggested that the 8CX Gen 4 would have eight performance cores and four efficiency cores.

Unfortunately, you won’t be able to determine how much of a performance improvement there is over the 8CX Gen 3. With a single-core score of 613 and a multi-core score of 5241, this benchmark performs worse than the 8CX Gen 3. The fact that this is, in fact, an engineering sample may help to explain why it is a legitimate benchmark for a legitimate engineering sample. Drivers and firmware would be in pre-release, and the silicon itself might not even be a finished design. In this benchmark, the performance cores’ frequency is 3 GHz, while the efficiency cores’ frequency is 2.38 GHz.

We’ll undoubtedly receive updates on this as it approaches completion.