More powerful Snapdragon 845 ‘always connected’ PCs could arrive later in 2018

Last week witnessed the revelation of the first ‘always connected’ laptops powered by Snapdragon 835 chips, and already we’re hearing that more powerful PCs built around the Snapdragon 845 will reportedly arrive in the second half of 2018.

This is according to a report by Fudzilla, which notes that Qualcomm executives including Cristiano Amon (president of Qualcomm’s CDMA Technologies division) confirmed that Snapdragon 845 machines will be here in the second half of next year. Quite possibly in the third quarter of 2018, in time for ‘back-to-school’ sales.

This isn’t really that much of a surprise, seeing as this is the natural next step up from Snapdragon 835. Indeed, the Snapdragon 845 SoCs were also unveiled last week, and as we noted at the time they will power not just phones, but also laptops and VR headsets at some point over the next year.

Learning curve

Of course, Microsoft and Qualcomm started developing their ‘always connected’ PCs some time back, so the Snapdragon 835 was the available chip they were working with for initial offerings. Apparently achieving x86 emulation on ARM has unsurprisingly been quite a tough learning curve…

The Snapdragon 835 laptops which will first hit the market are the Asus NovaGo and HP Envy x2, with the latter expected to arrive in the spring of 2018. While the Fudzilla report suggests that we could see improved Snapdragon 845 notebooks early in Q3, HP’s release date for the Envy suggests to us that later in the quarter might be more likely for Snapdragon 845 machines.

It’s also worth noting that we saw a leak at the start of the month which indicates that Microsoft is building a new Surface device which will be powered by Snapdragon 845 – possibly its rumored two-screen Courier-like offering.

One thing’s for sure: these new ARM SoCs look like they’re going to bring some pretty neat tricks to the portable party, beyond the initial 20-hour battery longevity provided by Snapdragon 835 machines.

Via: Neowin

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