Qualcomm Snapdragon ditches energy saving for power to fight Apple Silicon

Mobile SoC manufacturer Qualcomm is fighting back against Apple's powerful M1 chip. Following the release of Apple Silicon last year, the ARM-based hardware company is betting big on power.

Reported by WinFuture, the next Qualcomm Snapdragon chip will ditch their usual energy saving hardware. Instead of mixing performance and low-power hardware, the next-gen chip will be all performance all the time.

What chips are Qualcomm creating?

WinFuture's report states that Qualcomm is working on two versions of their new SC8280 SoC. Designed to power ARM-based laptops that rival the M1-powered MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, these chips will use high-powered cores than before.

The more powerful chip, referred to as the SC8280XP, will be an eight core chip. Four cores will be clocked at a swift 2.43GHz while the other four will be clocked at 2.7GHz. The report claims that some sample chips are able to hit 3GHz speeds.

Even with these impressive clocks, the SC8280XP still falls behind the Apple M1 in terms of numbers. The first generation Apple Silicon chips target a maximum clock speed of 3.2GHz.

What hardware will be powered by the Snapdragon SC8280 chips?

Qualcomm's SC8280 chips appear to be targeting the laptop space. As the successor of the 8cx processors, Qualcomm's battery friendly chips lend well to laptop hardware.

WinFuture's report backs this up. Sample hardware powered by the SC8280 processors feature 14-inch displays with RAM configurations up to 32GB. With the removal of energy-saving hardware, there's a sense that Qualcomm is aiming for a different brand of laptop than they're known for.