Affordable Windows laptops and Chromebooks are set to receive a major boost in computing performance and camera quality from Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 compute platform, launched Monday.
The new eight-core chip uses the San Diego tech giant’s latest Spectra 255 image signal processor, which could drastically reduce the annoying blur and graininess that is common in laptop webcams. Webcam quality has received renewed attention during the pandemic and its related lockdowns, which have forced many workers to resort to videoconferencing as a replacement for in-person interaction. Advanced image signal processing works best with high-quality cameras—say, 10-megapixel or greater, with the ability to shoot at least 1080p video. Qualcomm notes that the Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 chip can use up to 32-megapixel cameras, which are unheard of on even flagship laptops. But Spectra 255 features such as temporal filtering and multi-frame noise reduction could still improve the quality of video calls on even the most basic webcams.
The Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 will show up mostly in $300-to-$700 Windows laptops and Chromebooks. This corner of the PC market has become critical for distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, as school districts and parents seek to equip their students with capable homework platforms that won’t break the bank. In addition to better image quality, the 7c Gen 2 will include standard Snapdragon features that typically aren’t seen on competing budget processors from Intel and MediaTek. These include an integrated LTE modem and the ability for “multiple days” of battery life, Qualcomm says.
The new chip works similarly to the more powerful Snapdragon processors that power many flagship smartphones, and also bears some resemblance to the Apple M1. It features eight processor cores, each of which are designed to handle specific types of computing workflows. There are also separate Adreno graphics cores, and the whole chip is built on an advanced 8-nanometer production process.
Zoom Gets the Snapdragon Treatment
Despite the advanced capabilities of Snapdragon silicon, Qualcomm has faced an uphill battle in getting laptop OEMs to use it instead of the more prevalent Intel and AMD options. Many Chromebooks and budget Windows notebooks use Athlon, Pentium, or Celeron processors, while more expensive models use chips from the Intel Core or AMD Ryzen families.
In an attempt to speed up adoption, Qualcomm also announced Monday that it will begin distributing a Snapdragon-based tiny PC to Windows software developers. The Snapdragon developer kit, designed in tandem with Microsoft, will be commercially available at the Microsoft Store this summer. The two companies plan to release more details about the kit during Microsoft’s annual Build developer conference this week.
Qualcomm and Microsoft hope that the dev kit will speed up the optimization of third-party apps that were originally designed to run on Intel and AMD (x86) processors. Transitioning these apps to run natively on the ARM architecture that Snapdragon uses has been a slow process. Many household names, including the videoconferencing app Zoom, are not yet optimized. A new version of that app will also arrive this summer, with the company promising that it will enable “significantly longer battery life” on Snapdragon PCs.
