20 PCWorld JANUARY 2022NEWS QUALCOMM’S SNAPDRAGON PROPHESY
Thompson said that Qualcomm’s goal
was to have the “highest-performing, lowest-
power CPU in the industry” and that the new
chips would “set the performance benchmark
for Windows PCs.”
Low power, of course, is a goal that
Qualcomm has always easily achieved.
Qualcomm’s Arm-powered CPUs sip power,
using a “big-little” mix of performance and
efficiency cores that are allocated for specific
tasks and whose overarching design has
been mimicked in Intel’s 12th-gen Alder Lake
Core chips.
Qualcomm’s problem has been that its
“performance” cores have failed to keep up
with X86 designs from AMD and Intel,
putting them in a niche market where
performance doesn’t matter as much as
battery life. Our tests of the Snapdragon 8cx
Gen 2 5G from earlier showed that it (in the
HP Elite Folio) offered performance about on
par with the Surface Pro 3 (fave.co/3IU35w2)
and its 4th-gen Core chip. Unfortunately, theRight now, Snapdragon chips for laptops struggle
to keep up with the competition.LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCEAcer Swift 3 SF314-42-R9YNRyzen 7 4700U
Microsoft Surface Laptop 3Core i7-1065G
Walmart Motile M142Ryzen 5 3500U
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Tablet(3rd Gen) Core i5-8250U
Microsoft Surface LaptopCore i5-7200Y
Microsoft Surface Go 2Core m3-8100Y
Microsoft Surface Pro 3Core i5-
HP Elite ProSnapdragon 8cx Gen 2
Microsoft Surface GoPentium 4415Y
Microsoft Surface Pro XMicrosoft SQ
Samsung Galaxy Book SSnapdragon 8cx
Lenovo Yoga C630Snapdragon 8504,4,3,3,2,2,1,2,1,PCMark 8 Creative
CPU performance1,76 01,1,Qualcomm had this to say about its Nuvia-powered Snapdragon CPUs.PC industry’s answer has simply been to add
more battery cells to their designs, making
those laptops a bit thicker and heavier but
with more performance,
too. Qualcomm
Snapdragon chips also
haven’t been able to keep
up with the Apple M1 (fave.
co/3DY6UwD), a chip
that benefits from Apple’s
more open architectural
license.
“If you think about the
overall technology