TAIPEI—A Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 system on a chip (SoC) makes for a very powerful, capable smartphone, but when you use that same chip in a Windows 10 laptop like the Asus NovaGo, you get a painfully slow computer, albeit one with excellent battery life that's always connected to 4G LTE data.
So Qualcomm's next project, unveiled at Computex here on Tuesday, is designed to boost computing performance while keeping the excellent LTE and battery life. It's called the Snapdragon 850, and unlike previous chips from the company, this one is exclusively designed to power Windows machines. You won't find it in any smartphones.
Forking the Snapdragon lineup into phone and PC versions is significant because it allowed the company's engineers to boost clock speeds and take advantage of cooling capabilities that would be impossible within a smartphone's relatively tiny enclosure. The Snapdragon 850's CPU runs at 2.95GHz, compared with the 2.6GHz of the 835, and it has an X20 LTE modem that's capable of up to 1.2GBps of throughput.
Theoretically, those gains are a welcome improvement. Even though gigabit LTE doesn't exist in most areas of the US yet, a modem that's capable of greater-than-gigabit speeds will help boost performance in areas where signal strength is weak, Qualcomm said. And a processor that's a few hundred megahertz faster could reduce the time you must wait for your Windows app to load.
But the first generation of Snapdragon-powered PCs sets the bar very low, in part because they are hobbled by software limitations unrelated to clock speeds, modem capabilities, and core counts. The limitations mostly involve emulating software originally written for Intel and AMD processors, and it's something Microsoft and third-party software developers must solve before the platform is very useful. Fortunately, they're working on it.
During a demo at Computex, Qualcomm showed off a reference design detachable Windows tablet powered by a Snapdragon 850 running various games both natively and in emulation. There was no noticeable screen lag, even on a Chinese PUBG-style game that was running under x86 32-bit emulations.
Intel also announced some new efficient laptop processors of its own at Computex, including Whiskey Lake and Amber Lake CPUs, and teased that laptops with 5G-capable modems will be ready next year. Even if they don't turn out to have as good a battery life as Snapdragon-powered PCs, neither will their performance be hampered by emulation.
The Snapdragon 850 demos were quite encouraging, but the reality is that the software limitations and the renewed competition from Intel mean that Snapdragon 850-powered machines will likely arrive on the market with a pace similar to their 835 predecessors—in a trickle, not a flood.