Of course, this is a 7nm SOC with quite a powerful modem inside and it will also be able to connect with 5G chips. The new SoC has a significantly bigger GPU compared to any Snapdragon 800 series.
Previous generations of Snapdragon 835 and 850 were in fact faster versions of the high-end phone chip. This was just warming up and testing the market. It takes time to get Windows and all the software polished up and optimized but the new Snapdragon that some call 1000 - and this is also not the brand - ends up being much more competitive compared to the Intel 7th generation Core i5. This was always the target. The chaps at winfuture quote 8.5B transistors which is significantly more than A12 or Kirin 980 - they both have 6.9 billion transistors.
The fact that Qualcomm solution can end up always connected and with a better battery life is impressive and with stronger CPU core and bigger GPU, under less or the same TDP, Snapdragon ACPC (Always connected PC) will find it customers.
The new ARM Cortex A76 based cores are the key to success. ARM was very vocal with us back in late May about the 35 percent more performance, 40 percent battery efficiency and 4X improvements in machine learning compared to Cortex A75. Of course, Qualcomm has the Kryo version of this core and in the laptop form factor ARM promises clocks up to 3.3GHz with 64KB L1 cache, 512KB L2 and 4MB L3 cache.
And the bigger GPU, Adreno based of course, has two tasks: it will help gaming performance for casual gamers in this part of the market and the AI/ML performance and features of the new integrated circuit.