Hands On With The Snapdragon 8c And 7c, Qualcomm's Value-PC Play

We couldn’t run benchmarks, so here are some common tasks.

- Mark Hachman

Let’s be honest: We’re a bit skeptical of the new Snapdragon 7c and 8c story (go.pcworld.com/7c8c), Qualcomm’s latest expansion of its Snapdragon Compute lineup into cheaper markets. But we had a chance to play around with them, and they’re...fine?

At the Qualcomm Snapdragon Technology Summit in Maui, Hawaii, the company offered reporters a chance to try out a pair of 7c and 8c demo machines. Both of the units we saw were reference designs, with pre-production hardware.

Miguel Nunes, senior director of product management for compute products, supplied us with a few more details about each chip. The 7c includes a pair of ARM Cortex-A76 “performance” cores, with six Cortex-A55 cores serving as the low-power “efficiency” cores. There’s an X15 LTE modem, too.

The Snapdragon 8c uses four A76 and four A55 cores each, a higher-performing mix that’s paired with a 2Gbps X24 LTE modem or an optional 5G modem, the X55. If that means nothing to you, that’s fine: Nunes said that you should think of the Snapdragon 8cx as a Core i5, the 8c as a Core i3, and the 7c as a Celeron-based Pentium processor.