Purported Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chipset spotted on Geekbench

Early this month, Roland Quandt of WinFuture.de said that Qualcomm is working on a next-gen Snapdragon 8cx internally named SC8280 with an aim to take on the Apple M1 chip. Today, the third-gen chipset might have appeared on the Geekbench benchmarks.

A Geekbench 5 listing shows a benchmark of a device codenamed “Qualcomm QRD”. The device has a processor that is shown as  “Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3”. It is an octa-core chipset and has a base frequency of 2.69GHz.

This is in line with Roland’s report who said that the chipset would be clocked at 2.7GHz. That is, if this is the third-gen 8cx, then it would have 4xGold+ cores at 2.7GHz and 4xGold cores clocked at 2.43GHz.

Anyway, the listing shows that the device scores 982 on single-core and 4,918 on multi-core categories. According to the Notebookcheck report, these scores match only 56% of Apple M1 performance. While the overall performance has improved, it looks like Qualcomm still needs a lot of catching to do with Apple.

That said, this particular benchmark isn’t necessarily verified as the third-gen Snapdragon 8cx chipset although it has the identifier ‘ARMv8’ on it. And even if this is the one, the sample could be of a prototype so let’s wait for an official word on the performance data.

The upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx chipset is said to be used primarily in Windows notebooks including the 2-in-1 machines. It will probably have an integrated NPU to handle AI-based tasks with up to 15 TOP(Trillions of Operations) of performance.

All these are hinting towards a competitive iteration from Qualcomm and only time will tell if it will up the ante and play a tug of war with its rivals in 2021.

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