Engineers work on the Snapdragon 1000 & # 39; 12W • The register

The leak of the development kit seems to rely on the job descriptions of technicians

Something like that … An earlier SDM850 reference design

Qualcomm is apparently working on another high-end, 64-bit compatible, on-chip system compatible with Windows 10 computers – the Snapdragon 1000.

Here's the range of American chip designers up here for personal computers: the Snapdragon 835, which has made its way into some moderately overcrowded and slightly dull touch-screen laptops; the 845 announced in December for high-end phones and laptops; and the 850, a slightly faster version of the 845, announced earlier this month.

Qualcomm, best known for the design of smart phone processors and cellular modems, is always ready to penetrate the market of ever-connected netbooks – mid-range laptops that can access the Internet whenever you want, via a 4G connection or Wi-Fi integrated.

There are some disadvantages to the Arm-powered laptops, especially those of Windows: software and performance. While versions of Arm applications appear on the Windows Store, your typical Windows x86 application needs to be run under emulation, the speed of which is admirable but not perfect. Windows 10 on Arm has only adopted 64-bit programs, although the underlying system-on-chip is compatible with the 64-bit Armv8-A.

There is also the question of whether mobile-grade arm-based processors can really match Intel and AMD processors in the slab market. In the benchmarks, it seems that Arm's designs – such as Apple's custom pieces and the Arm Cortex-A series – are catching up. However, the use of the real world is another story.

The benefits are longer battery life and thinner fanless PCs.

Watt is everyone

Well, it may be shaken. The world of weapons has generally been a low-power, do-over-with-less affair, suitable for phones, tablets and embedded hardware. To become serious in the world of desktops or servers, he must start throwing those power budgets upwind, and suck up a few watts to boost performance.

Qualcomm's engineers are supposed to do just that, working on a Snapdragon system-on-chip that pulls up to 12W, it's claimed.

This portable quality Snapdragon 1000 has been the subject of rumors in recent weeks. This is not surprising: the semiconductor industry is full of speculation all the time, and no one should be shocked that Qualcomm is working on future chips.

However, over the weekend, we've seen some Qualcomm engineering job descriptions on LinkedIn that mention the SDM1000, so maybe the whispers are real.

A Microsoft Windows multimedia project engineer said his job was "to oversee and manage all test operations on the Qualcomm Snapdragon SDM845 and SDM1000 high quality chipset." Another, who left in January 2018, "contributed to the design and implementation of hardware control firmware for the LTE demapper" for the SDM1000. And another said that he oversaw the validation and testing of a "secure processing unit physically isolated on SDM1000".

What exactly is the Snapdragon 1000? The CPU cores total up to 6.5W, and up to 12W in total for the 20-by-15-bit system-on-chip, it supports at least 16GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 256GB of flash storage, and it has Gigabit and LTE Wi-Fi, according to the specifications of a hardware development kit seen by the German technology leaf WinFuture.

The SDM1000 should use Arm Cortex-A76 cores manufactured using the TSMC 7nm process node. The estimated arm of an A76-based system-on-chip should be comparable to a 15W Intel Core i5 mobile part. It is said that Asus is working on a PC called Primus using the SDM1000.

In short, judging by these details, the Snapdragon 1000 is physically smaller than its x86 competitors, and it consumes a little less energy than its competitors – for comparison, the Core Y and U processors of the Nintendo DS are the most popular of the time. Intel reach 4.5W at 15W, and AMD's Ryzen moving parts draw 15W.

As we have seen with the Snapdragon 835, the final price of the machines – including 4G LTE plans – and the performance of the application will make or break this big system-on-chip. There is no publicly known release date for this processor.

A Qualcomm spokesperson was not available for immediate comment. ®

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