Benchmark results for Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 SoC appeared on Geekbench Browser early yesterday morning, under the designation Snapdragon 8cx Next Gen. This chipset is tipped to be a successor to the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, which was launched at the end of 2021 as the world's first 5 nm Arm-based SoC for Windows laptops. A tipster on Twitter has highlighted the very underwhelming results posted by the next gen chipset, and these figures would indicate that an engineering sample was the test subject, not final silicon. The 8-core Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 is shown to outperform its supposed successor, and the clock frequencies for the latter appear to be lower than anticipated.

The Geekbench 5 database entry for Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 also reveals details about its specifications - a 12-core configuration that is split into eight performance cores and four power-efficiency ones. The base core frequency is listed as being 2.38 GHz, and the benchmark was completed under a Balanced Power plan in Windows 11 Home Insider Preview. 16 GB of RAM was used in the test kit, although earlier leaks have indicated that the chipset can support up to a maximum of 64 GB LPDDR5 RAM.The Geekbench listing also shows that the codename 'Hamoa' has been assigned to the Snapdragon 8cx Next Gen PC processor. Qualcomm's custom Nuvia Phoenix-based 'Oryon' cores are purported to be used in the 8+ 4 cluster setup. Older leaks have pointed out a high-end Hamoa with the performance cores being tested at around 3.4 GHz, and the efficiency cores at approximately 2.5 GHz - so yesterday's engineering sample specs look surprisingly weak when compared to the late 2022 speculation. Perhaps a weaker variant of the Hamoa SoC was submitted as a sample. The high-end Hamoa chipset was rumored to have its cores clustered in blocks of four, with 12 MB of shared L2 cache, plus 8 MB of L3 cache. An additional 12 MB is available as system cache, and 4 MB for GPU tasks.Qualcomm's Nuvia team was formed by ex-members of Apple's M1 chipset engineering department. It will be interesting to see how finalized commercial examples of the Hamoa (8P+4E) family of CPUs will stack up against Apple's current generation M2 (4P+4E) desktop and laptop processors.