Qualcomm seems to be interested in making chips for notebooks. The first generation ACPC (fully interconnected PC) using the Snapdragon 835 did not trigger a huge market reaction, and then Qualcomm introduced the 2.96GHz Snapdragon 850. Recently, there were reports that Qualcomm’s high-end ARM chip, initially developed as the SDM1000 will get a new name. Now, a new Qualcomm chip, Snapdragon 8180, just appeared on Geekbench and salient information suggests that this chip is not designed for smartphones.
The chip is dubbed “Qualcomm MTP”. At first glance, this is unusual but if you take a closer look, it becomes clear that this is a first test run of a developer system running Windows 10 on ARM on a completely new chip – the Qualcomm “Snapdragon 1000”. or “SC8180”. Actually, “MTP” stands for “Mobile Test Platform”, which does not necessarily mean a smartphone platform. Since the new chip, which was recently introduced to us as the SCX8180 and was previously developed as “SDM1000”, with a size of 20×15 millimeters, it is considerably larger than its mobile counterpart thus it should indeed be a notebook SOC.
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This new chip has a single-core score of 1392 and a multi-core score of 4286. For vertical comparison, the typical running points of the Snapdragon 835 Win10 platform are single-core 911 and multi-core 3278 while the typical running points of the Snapdragon 850 Win10 platform are single-core 1281 and multi-core 3485. This means that on the single-core test, the SD8180 is 53% and 8.7% faster than SD835 and SD850 chips respectively while on the multi-core test, SD8180 is 31% and 23% faster than the SD835 and SD850 chips respectively. Qualcomm Snapdragon 8180 chip uses an 8-core configuration setup. The CPU architecture is expected to be based on the Cortex A75/A76 with a minimum frequency of 1.96GHz.
Qualcomm will present the Snapdragon 8180 for the first time next year. The earliest manufacturer to use this chip will be Taiwanese PC manufacturer ASUS, which is currently working on a device with the codename “Primus”. However, we do not expect to see this notebook or SD8180 anytime soon.
