Qualcomm 7c Gen 2 Targets Low-End Windows, Chromebooks

Qualcomm has a new Arm processor ready for Windows and Chrome. Today, it announced the Snapdragon 7c Gen 2, aimed at laptops starting at $349, which means you probably won’t see it powering the best Ultrabrooks and premium laptops.

The company claims that this will bring premium features to budget machines, including long battery life (Qualcomm will tell you it's "all-day" depending on usage), quick wake from sleep, and a chassis that's less than 15mm thick.

The 7c Gen 2 SoC boasts a Qualcomm Kryo 468 octa-core CPU up to 2.55 GHz, a Qualcomm Adreno GPU, a Qualcomm Spectra 255 image signal processor for 14-bit processing, a Snapdragon X15 LTE modem and up to Wi-Fi 5 (ac).

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Notably, for both Windows and Chrome, Qualcomm hasn't provided specific test scores, nor compared it to the original Snapdragon 7c. Instead, it has normalized performance versus Intel's Celeron N4020 and N5030 and, on the Chrome side, the Mediatek MT8183. Unsurprisingly, the newer processor wins out. On Windows, Qualcomm claims to be up to 60% more efficient than Intel's Celerons by dividing the PCMark 10 performance score by PCMark 10 battery life consumption. In other tests, the N5030 was more powerful.

Qualcomm is also promising other benefits, including better webcam quality thanks to its Spectra 255 image signal processor and clearer audio with Qualcomm Aqstic. 

Today, Qualcomm also announced a Snapdragon development kit running Windows 10 on Arm so that developers can port apps to ARM64. That will ship this summer.