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Back when Qualcomm first announced the Snapdragon X Arm-based chip for PC, it made big claims about gaming prowess, including supposedly “testing and optimising” the chip with no fewer than 1,200 games. Well, we’re still waiting for gaming on Arm to be a real goer, but apparently Qualcomm already has a follow-up chip coming, the Snapdragon X2 with up to 18 CPU cores.
The existing Snapdragon X comes with up to 12 CPU cores in Snapdragon X Elite models. So, the rumoured uplift to 18 cores according to WinFuture (via WCCFtech) is plausible.
The cores are said to be Oryon V3 spec. Presumably that indicates the third generation of the Oryon CPU architecture, which is roughly analogous to the various generations of Zen CPU designs from AMD.
It’s also thought that this new chip could be part of Qualcomm’s plan to move onto the desktop with its Arm chips, which have been restricted to mobile PCs thus far. That effort, allegedly codenamed “Project Glymur” would no doubt benefit from a CPU with even higher core counts.
The new chip is further said to implement SiP or System in Package technology, which could see both RAM and storage integrated into the CPU package. That’s actually something that would be more beneficial for mobile form factors in terms of packaging, but no doubt the main SoC could be used for both desktop and mobile with different packaging.
All that said, for gaming much of this is academic. The CPU cores in the existing Snapdragon X chips are arguably plenty performant enough. The problem is software support and graphics performance.
Despite that early claim of testing and optimising 1,200 games, over eight months into the brave gaming-on-Arm experiment, you still wouldn’t want to actually use a Snapdragon PC as a gaming rig.
In basic terms, either Qualcomm needs to convince game devs to port their wares directly for the Snapdragon architecture or it needs to do a much better job of emulation. Neither is a simple task.
Meanwhile, this rumour makes no mention of any update to the Snapdragon X’s Adreno iGPU. If anything needs an upgrade for the next gen of Snapdragon to make gaming more compelling, it’s the Adreno iGPU, not the CPU cores.
On paper, the Adreno iGPU is pretty powerful, bettering the raw performance of the Steam Deck, for instance. In practice, the results are patchy, with too many games either crashing outright or suffering very low minimum frame rate dips, making games feel glitchy and buggy.
As it happens, it might end up being Nvidia’s entry into the Arm chip market that eventually makes gaming on a Qualcomm SoC viable. If anyone can get games running well on Arm chips, it’ll be Nvidia.
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Kurt Indovina
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