10 PCWorld JANUARY 2020NEWS
IMAGE: MARK HACHMANHands on with the Snapdragon 8c
and 7c, Qualcomm’s value-PC play
We couldn’t run benchmarks, so here are some common tasks. BY MARK HACHMANL
et’s be honest: We’re a bit skeptical
of the new Snapdragon 7c and 8c
story (go.pcworld.com/7c8c),
Qualcomm’s latest expansion of its
Snapdragon Compute lineup into cheaper
markets. But we had a chance to play around
with them, and they’re...fine?
At the Qualcomm Snapdragon
Technology Summit in Maui, Hawaii, the
company offered reporters a chance to try out
a pair of 7c and 8c demo machines. Both of
the units we saw were reference designs, with
pre-production hardware.Miguel Nunes, senior director of product
management for compute products, supplied
us with a few more details about each chip.
The 7c includes a pair of ARM Cortex-A
“performance” cores, with six Cortex-A
cores serving as the low-power “efficiency”
cores. There’s an X15 LTE modem, too.
The Snapdragon 8c uses four A76 and
four A55 cores each, a higher-performing mix
that’s paired with a 2Gbps X24 LTE modem or
an optional 5G modem, the X55. If that
means nothing to you, that’s fine: Nunes said
that you should think of the Snapdragon 8cx