Qualcomm's next Snapdragon chipset could give low-end laptops a big boost

After news of a new flagship chipset made waves last week, Qualcomm is reportedly developing a Snapdragon 7c successor — a mid-range Arm-based PC chipset to support cheaper hardware. Per WinFuture, the likely addition to the series bears the internal model number SC7295.

The publication believes the silicon is a variant of the Snapdragon 775 chip for smartphones set to power the yet-to-be-released Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite. Leaked Snapdragon 775 specs point to a 5nm manufacturing process, mmWave 5G support, and LPDDR5 RAM support.

As for hardware details, the chip doesn’t adopt the same all-performance core layout as the rumored Snapdragon 8cx successor. The chipset features eight cores in total, with four pulling low-power processing duties clocked at 1.8GHz. One pure performance core also exists, clocked at 2.7GHz. The remaining three cores see clock speeds of 2.4GHz.

That layout is still a departure from the original Snapdragon 7c. It sported two performance Cortex-A76 cores clocked at 2.4GHz and another six Cortex-A55 cores. The new chipset should offer considerable processing power gains over its predecessor.

There’s no mention of testing hardware, so we know little about the devices Qualcomm is hoping to power. But considering that the Snapdragon 7c found itself in devices like Chromebooks, it’s likely the new chip will be used in similar applications.