Qualcomm’s commitment to the ARM chip-based notebook segment is growing. It does so with the new Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 Compute Platform, 8nm Socs aimed at entry-level laptops and Chromebooks.
We will therefore find these chips in modest and affordable equipment, and according to Qualcomm the objective with them is to offer a remarkable battery life and remarkable image processing for video conferencing. Their performance is discreet, and these are certainly not the SoCs that will put Apple’s M1s into trouble.
A modest chip but promising in efficiency
The main processor is the Qualcomm Kryo 468 with eight cores and clock frequencies that reach 2.55 GHz. Efficiency is the key according to the manufacturer who claims that it is up to 60% more efficient than Intel’s Celeron N4020 having a similar power.
The teams that integrate it will also be able to take advantage of its four channels of LPDDR4x memory at 4,266 MHz. The Adreno GPU supports QHD screens (2,560 x 1,440 pixels at 60 Hz), something that again shows that we are here before a more restrained SoC that does not support 4K displays.
The new Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 stands out especially for the integration of the ISP (Image Signal Processing) Qualcomm Spectra 255, an element that, according to the manufacturer, will allow you to enjoy video conferences with remarkable image quality.
This is contributed by the 14-bit processing supported on the chip and the support of Qualcomm Aqstic technology that allows audio to be processed to eliminate noise in video conferences so that voice transmission is optimal.
These chips also have support for Wi-Fi 5 networks and for 4G / LTE mobile networks (through the Snapdragon X15 LTE modem), thus allowing the user to switch between one and the other according to needs.
The new Qualcomm chip will appear in laptops based on both Windows 10 for ARM and Chromebooks based on Chrome OS, but we can also find it in a new developer kit in summer 2021.
