PC World - USA (2020-01)

JANUARY 2020 PCWorld 11

performed a few standard tasks: playing back

a 4K, 60-fps video from YouTube, scrolling

through a large Excel spreadsheet, and

loading fairly intensive web pages.

There was a bit of stutter playing back the

4K video, and that’s after we made sure it had

buffered appropriately. (The demo room Wi-Fi

was satisfactory, but not overly so.) I’d say

video performance would be satisfactory for a

majority of users, however. Scrolling around a

large Excel spreadsheet felt smooth, though

we didn’t have the opportunity to perform any

calculations. The machine felt responsive

enough when loading sites like PCWorld.com,

using both the optimized version of Firefox and

the new, optimized Edge.

We had a completely different experience

playing Asphalt 9: Legends, the sequel to the

popular Asphalt 8 racing game. Here, the

fast-paced race through a downtown city

stuttered and even paused for a second or

as a Core i5, the 8c as
a Core i3, and the 7c
as a Celeron-based
Pentium processor.
Unfortunately, the
8cx itself hasn’t exactly
blown the roof off the
PC market. While
Qualcomm previously
promised that the 8cx
would deliver Core i
performance in the
PCMark 10 Apps
benchmark, it came up way short. (This
particular benchmark is important, as it
directly loads Word, Excel, PowerPoint and
Edge, all of which should run fairly comparably
on both ARM and Intel-based machines.)
Here’s our PCMark 10 Apps score for the
Microsoft Surface Pro X tablet, which uses an
8cx-based custom chip, the Microsoft SQ1.
It’s just not even close to an older Core i5.
The question is how much performance
the midrange (under $800 or so) and the
low-end (under $400) market expects, and
how much Qualcomm can deliver. You’ll also
have to factor in caveats like the Snapdragon’s
current inability to run 64-bit Windows apps,
even through emulation.

HANDS ON WITH THE
SNAPDRAGON 8C
Qualcomm’s demo machines came with one
rule: no benchmarking. Instead, we

M(Core i7-1065G7)icrosoft Surface Laptop 3

Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Tablet (3rd Gen) (Core i5-8250U)

Microsoft Surface Laptop

(Core i5-7200U)

Microsoft Surface Pro X

(CMicrosoft SQ1)

Lenovo Yoga C630 (2.4GHz

8-core Core i9 2019)

M(Pentium Surface Go)icrosoft Surface Go

PCMark 10 Apps

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

8,

5,

6,

4,

2,

3,