Snapdragon 8cx Gen4 adopts TSMC’s 4nm process
Qualcomm hosted the Snapdragon Technology Summit from November 15th to November 17th last year and announced the new Oryon processor code-named “Hamoa”, which uses a custom core of NUVIA technology and is compatible with the Arm instruction set. It was previously reported that the official name of this chip is the Snapdragon 8cx Gen4.
According to Notebookcheck, although the Snapdragon 8cx Gen4 will not be shipped until 2024, Qualcomm did not choose TSMC’s 3nm process but only chose the 4nm process. As for the specific 4nm process, it is unclear for the time being. TSMC currently provides N4, N4P, and N4X for customers to choose from, among which N4X is the strongest and is oriented to high-performance computing chips.
The CPU part of the 4th generation Snapdragon 8cx has 12 cores, including 8 performance cores with a maximum frequency of 3.4GHz, and 4 custom-designed energy efficiency cores with a maximum frequency of 2.5GHz. The chip will be divided into three clusters, each with 12MB of L2 cache, a total of 36MB of L2 cache, 8MB of L3 cache, 12MB of system cache, and 4MB of GPU cache. The GPU part draws on the design of Adreno 740, supports DirectX 12, OpenCL/DirectML, and Vulkan 1.3, and is equipped with an AV1 codec. At the same time, the chip is also equipped with Hexagon Tensor NPU, which can provide an AI performance of 45 TOPS.
In addition, the 4th generation Snapdragon 8cx supports LPDDR5X-4200 memory with a maximum capacity of 64GB. There’s also support for NVMe, UFS 4.0, Wi-Fi 7, and the Snapdragon X65 5G modem, and you can even use Thunderbolt 4 to connect to an external discrete graphics card. Qualcomm is already testing engineering samples of the 4th generation Snapdragon 8cx, and all 12 cores can run up to 3GHz.
