That is some pretty weak sauce right there. Two useful cores, nerf'ed graphics, and half the memory bandwidth (one quarter that of the new 8 series). That's exceedingly entry level. That wouldn't even make a decent tablet let alone a laptop.
They don't want this market. They can't have monopoly profits like with phones, so the pricing will never be right. They can't sell premium devices at least until MS gets their software in order on ARM, yet that's all they've been selling until now, because they don't want to compete. They think the phone OEMs are captive and why bother giving up money for a less profitable market?
Yup! These 7cx look like QC's approach to "reduce, reuse, recycle". At the current level, they only scare Atom CPUs, and not even the more recent ones. If Samsung has fab capacity, even their newer mid-range Exynos SoCs have more oomph, and their higher end ones would make for good Windows on ARM designs.
Agreed. Besides Microsoft being extremely bad in providing ARM support Qualcomm also lacks providing interestng products for Windows as they only use weak and old rebrands.
It might be that they do not want to waste money on design before Microsoft gets it working. I hope we will see better and state of art designs in future and not just old rebrands of old mobile chips.
I guess the flagship phone SoC market is just way bigger, but having a phone SoC out for months with a bigger core (X1) and a smaller process ("5nm") than their just-announced refresh for laptops isn't a great sign that they're really determined to expand into new things. Bluh.
> having a phone SoC out for months with a bigger core (X1) and a smaller process ("5nm") > than their just-announced refresh for laptops isn't a great sign that they're really > determined to expand into new things.
Don't forget: there's a shortage of fab capacity, right now. I'm sure their 5 nm chips are more expensive to produce than these, and the low-end laptop market is also low-margin. As long as they can keep selling every 5 nm SoC into phones, I don't see them diverting any of that supply to the laptop market.
What's funny is these A76's would run circles around a Raspberry Pi v4, and at a fraction of the power. And let's not even start on the Pi's crap GPU!
It's like I think Anand used to say: there are not bad products, only bad prices. Now, I think that assumes the product actually works as advertised, otherwise it is *indeed* a bad product.
Last time I checked even "budget" Snapdragon 7c devices were expensive, with 8cx being absurd.
You can get a Raspberry Pi 4B with 8 GB of RAM for $75, and there are still laptops and tablets with only 4 GB at several times the price. Like the joke Galaxy Tab S7 FE that just leaked.
As far as performance goes, laptop-oriented SoCs ought to have some Cortex-X1 cores.
> Last time I checked even "budget" Snapdragon 7c devices were expensive, with 8cx being absurd.
By "devices", you must mean laptops? Well, they have a screen, ssd, battery, keyboard, and shell. And, while some budget chromebooks manage to do all of that for a couple hundred $, I gather the devices you've seen weren't trying to be budget.
Now, let's consider that the 7c is an older SoC. So, there could be some real incentive to offer price breaks that would make it attractive for lower-cost devices. And if you take away basically everything but a housing, RAM, the board, and a PSU, I don't see why they couldn't get within the territory where someone looking for a higher-end alternative to an 8 GB Pi v4 would start to become interested.
After what Qualcomm did with smart watches, I’m beginning to believe they just have very low internal bandwidth. They can work on maybe 3-5 new SoCs a year (even as they occupy 7+ markets: phones, tablets, smartwatches, notebooks, modems, IoT, smartphone, automotive, etc.).
Mediatek’s newly announced CPUs are seemingly much more performant. ;( Qualcomm should at least try to compete at the high-end, instead of ceding it to MT.
MT8192: 4x A76, 4x A55 MT8195: 4x A78, 4x A55
Perhaps by December 2021 at Qualcomm’s summit, we’ll have a proper “8cxx”. I hope they can pull off one proper refresh before NUVIA’s Phoenix.
Qualcomm’s naming system is just confusing. You know, Apple’s “M1” and Ampere’s “Q80-33” (80 cores, 3.3 GHz) are far improved.
Qualcomm doesn't need to compete with others because they have no competition / a monopoly in the US due to patents.
So why would they suddenly be compelled to put energy into a new, undeveloped market with unknown capability with no way to monopolize it? I would not expect anything but the bare minimum for a flagship phone soc from qualcomm.
I can understand people hating on Qualcomm, as a business. But, they *do* make SoCs with the best cores ARM has to offer. And their GPUs aren't half bad, either.
I think you're confusing them with Apple. Their pricing isn't based on performance, but on telecom patents. They should be more interested in investing in the future, ie, competing sincerely for the PC/Tablet business. They haven't been.
So tell me where the difference is, apart from the name? 7c is just a 730G and the 8c a 855. Only the 8cx was new, a much broader Design on same IP like the 855.
I've never actually seen any of the non-8cx Windows-on-Snapdragon laptops for sale. As far as I can tell there isn't a single one in the ~300 Windows laptop models on the PC World site. Are they all going through institutional orders or something?
yes, Rockchip has a super cheap A76 chip coming out (should be, A76 is 3 years old) so I'm not sure why you'd spend any money on the 7c when it is coming to <$100 SBC soon
"This includes a dual-channel (32-bit) LPDDR4X memory bus.." This is kind of misleading, since the two channels of LPDDR4(X) are only internal, i.e. a single "physical" 32-bit channel that is also a (usually soldered) DIMM is split internally into two thin 16-bit "logical" channels.
This is just the way this type of DRAM works, an optimization technique, and the same applies to LPDDR5 and I believe also DDR5. In other words there is no way to have a single (internal) channel with these types of DRAM, which defeats the purpose of stating that they are "dual channel" with just one DIMM. Since they split the normal 32-bit channel width in two they work identically, in terms of bandwidth, as a single 32-bit channel.
Laptop and mobile phone manufacturers have been having a field day, marketing wise, with doubling the apparent channels of LPDDR4(X) and LPDDR5 and they get away with it because their DRAM is soldered (or soldered with one extra SODIMM in laptops). If the same is done with DDR5 later, which has clear, physical, distinct DIMMs, people are going to get confused.
p.s. Since the channels are internal of course they don't have distinct memory controllers. So in the case of Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 one memory controller handles both channels, which is yet another distinction with actual physical channels with distinct memory controllers.
I know Andrei keeps an eye on mobile processors for flagship phones but I would be interested to see what kind of test results get returned by this entry level notebook SoC (on Windows and either Android or Linux on Chrome OS). Comparing benchmark results for this SoC alongside those of the Celeron N4500 would make interesting reading. It would be very useful to have a snapshot of what the performance of entry level notebook processors look like these days. Power dissipation would be a particularly interesting detail.
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dwillmore - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
That is some pretty weak sauce right there. Two useful cores, nerf'ed graphics, and half the memory bandwidth (one quarter that of the new 8 series). That's exceedingly entry level. That wouldn't even make a decent tablet let alone a laptop.A5 - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
Yeah...they feel like they're treading water until ARMv9? I dunno.mode_13h - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
ARMv9? They've already released Snapdragons with A77 and A78 cores. Why not at least step up a generation and use A77 cores instead of the A76's?nico_mach - Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - link
They don't want this market. They can't have monopoly profits like with phones, so the pricing will never be right. They can't sell premium devices at least until MS gets their software in order on ARM, yet that's all they've been selling until now, because they don't want to compete. They think the phone OEMs are captive and why bother giving up money for a less profitable market?eastcoast_pete - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
Yup! These 7cx look like QC's approach to "reduce, reuse, recycle". At the current level, they only scare Atom CPUs, and not even the more recent ones. If Samsung has fab capacity, even their newer mid-range Exynos SoCs have more oomph, and their higher end ones would make for good Windows on ARM designs.Matthias B V - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
Agreed. Besides Microsoft being extremely bad in providing ARM support Qualcomm also lacks providing interestng products for Windows as they only use weak and old rebrands.It might be that they do not want to waste money on design before Microsoft gets it working. I hope we will see better and state of art designs in future and not just old rebrands of old mobile chips.
Maybe Nuvia also might play a role in that.
twotwotwo - Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - link
I guess the flagship phone SoC market is just way bigger, but having a phone SoC out for months with a bigger core (X1) and a smaller process ("5nm") than their just-announced refresh for laptops isn't a great sign that they're really determined to expand into new things. Bluh.mode_13h - Wednesday, May 26, 2021 - link
> having a phone SoC out for months with a bigger core (X1) and a smaller process ("5nm")> than their just-announced refresh for laptops isn't a great sign that they're really
> determined to expand into new things.
Don't forget: there's a shortage of fab capacity, right now. I'm sure their 5 nm chips are more expensive to produce than these, and the low-end laptop market is also low-margin. As long as they can keep selling every 5 nm SoC into phones, I don't see them diverting any of that supply to the laptop market.
jamesindevon - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
Freudian slip there: they're 468 cores, not 486!smalM - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
Qualcomm: If you don't need any performance we have a SoC for that.Alistair - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
Yeah! We're already so slow nobody wants it, so we'll release a slower product! Buy buy buy!mode_13h - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
What's funny is these A76's would run circles around a Raspberry Pi v4, and at a fraction of the power. And let's not even start on the Pi's crap GPU!It's like I think Anand used to say: there are not bad products, only bad prices. Now, I think that assumes the product actually works as advertised, otherwise it is *indeed* a bad product.
nandnandnand - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
Last time I checked even "budget" Snapdragon 7c devices were expensive, with 8cx being absurd.You can get a Raspberry Pi 4B with 8 GB of RAM for $75, and there are still laptops and tablets with only 4 GB at several times the price. Like the joke Galaxy Tab S7 FE that just leaked.
As far as performance goes, laptop-oriented SoCs ought to have some Cortex-X1 cores.
mode_13h - Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - link
> Last time I checked even "budget" Snapdragon 7c devices were expensive, with 8cx being absurd.By "devices", you must mean laptops? Well, they have a screen, ssd, battery, keyboard, and shell. And, while some budget chromebooks manage to do all of that for a couple hundred $, I gather the devices you've seen weren't trying to be budget.
Now, let's consider that the 7c is an older SoC. So, there could be some real incentive to offer price breaks that would make it attractive for lower-cost devices. And if you take away basically everything but a housing, RAM, the board, and a PSU, I don't see why they couldn't get within the territory where someone looking for a higher-end alternative to an 8 GB Pi v4 would start to become interested.
ikjadoon - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
After what Qualcomm did with smart watches, I’m beginning to believe they just have very low internal bandwidth. They can work on maybe 3-5 new SoCs a year (even as they occupy 7+ markets: phones, tablets, smartwatches, notebooks, modems, IoT, smartphone, automotive, etc.).Mediatek’s newly announced CPUs are seemingly much more performant. ;( Qualcomm should at least try to compete at the high-end, instead of ceding it to MT.
MT8192: 4x A76, 4x A55
MT8195: 4x A78, 4x A55
Perhaps by December 2021 at Qualcomm’s summit, we’ll have a proper “8cxx”. I hope they can pull off one proper refresh before NUVIA’s Phoenix.
Qualcomm’s naming system is just confusing. You know, Apple’s “M1” and Ampere’s “Q80-33” (80 cores, 3.3 GHz) are far improved.
foremi - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
Qualcomm doesn't need to compete with others because they have no competition / a monopoly in the US due to patents.So why would they suddenly be compelled to put energy into a new, undeveloped market with unknown capability with no way to monopolize it? I would not expect anything but the bare minimum for a flagship phone soc from qualcomm.
mode_13h - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
I can understand people hating on Qualcomm, as a business. But, they *do* make SoCs with the best cores ARM has to offer. And their GPUs aren't half bad, either.nico_mach - Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - link
I think you're confusing them with Apple. Their pricing isn't based on performance, but on telecom patents. They should be more interested in investing in the future, ie, competing sincerely for the PC/Tablet business. They haven't been.mode_13h - Wednesday, May 26, 2021 - link
> They should be more interested in investing in the futureEvery time they try, it seems they get threatened with lawsuits by activist investors.
mode_13h - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
> Qualcomm should at least try to compete at the high-end, instead of ceding it to MT.Have you heard of the Snapdragon 888?
ikjadoon - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
Have ya read any single complete sentence in this article?These are laptop SoCs. Different market, different SKUs. Find me one laptop with an SD888. 💀
mode_13h - Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - link
> These are laptop SoCs. Different market, different SKUs.Fair enough. Maybe this move is them trying to flush some older parts from their pipeline, before announcing he next wave.
KarlKastor - Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - link
So tell me where the difference is, apart from the name?7c is just a 730G and the 8c a 855.
Only the 8cx was new, a much broader Design on same IP like the 855.
Qualcomm needs more than two year old Designs.
ArcadeEngineer - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
I've never actually seen any of the non-8cx Windows-on-Snapdragon laptops for sale. As far as I can tell there isn't a single one in the ~300 Windows laptop models on the PC World site. Are they all going through institutional orders or something?amb9800 - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
They have a few models selling in the US through education channels, e.g. https://educationblog.microsoft.com/en-us/2020/01/...mode_13h - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
They're going to be up against Rockchip RK3588, which has quad-A76 + quad-A55, NPU, HDMI 2.1, 8k 60p decoding, and is made on 8 nm LP.nandnandnand - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
And it has AV1 decode, and supports 32 GB of RAM.Unfortunately, Rockchip RK3588 is late by a lot. Q3 2021 maybe?
Alistair - Monday, May 24, 2021 - link
yes, Rockchip has a super cheap A76 chip coming out (should be, A76 is 3 years old) so I'm not sure why you'd spend any money on the 7c when it is coming to <$100 SBC soonhanselltc - Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - link
A76? Why even try thenSantoval - Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - link
"This includes a dual-channel (32-bit) LPDDR4X memory bus.."This is kind of misleading, since the two channels of LPDDR4(X) are only internal, i.e. a single "physical" 32-bit channel that is also a (usually soldered) DIMM is split internally into two thin 16-bit "logical" channels.
This is just the way this type of DRAM works, an optimization technique, and the same applies to LPDDR5 and I believe also DDR5. In other words there is no way to have a single (internal) channel with these types of DRAM, which defeats the purpose of stating that they are "dual channel" with just one DIMM. Since they split the normal 32-bit channel width in two they work identically, in terms of bandwidth, as a single 32-bit channel.
Laptop and mobile phone manufacturers have been having a field day, marketing wise, with doubling the apparent channels of LPDDR4(X) and LPDDR5 and they get away with it because their DRAM is soldered (or soldered with one extra SODIMM in laptops). If the same is done with DDR5 later, which has clear, physical, distinct DIMMs, people are going to get confused.
Santoval - Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - link
p.s. Since the channels are internal of course they don't have distinct memory controllers. So in the case of Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 one memory controller handles both channels, which is yet another distinction with actual physical channels with distinct memory controllers.yeeeeman - Tuesday, May 25, 2021 - link
PointlessChrisGX - Thursday, July 8, 2021 - link
I know Andrei keeps an eye on mobile processors for flagship phones but I would be interested to see what kind of test results get returned by this entry level notebook SoC (on Windows and either Android or Linux on Chrome OS). Comparing benchmark results for this SoC alongside those of the Celeron N4500 would make interesting reading. It would be very useful to have a snapshot of what the performance of entry level notebook processors look like these days. Power dissipation would be a particularly interesting detail.