Qualcomm Snapdragon 1000 details leaked, it will challenge Intel Core CPUs for laptops

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Qualcomm leads the Smartphone processor market. And while the company is trying to get into the laptop market, which is still dominated by Intel, for several years now, 2019 could be the year when it gets the big breakthrough. The company is working on Snapdragon 1000, a successor to the Snapdragon 850 that will appear in some laptops later this year. The Snapdragon 1000 is reportedly a processor designed from grounds up for laptops and it aims to compete with Intel's fairly successful U series processor.

Just to remind you, laptops like the MacBook Air are powered by Intel U series processors, and if the Snapdragon 1000 can offer the kind of performance Intel chips do but at a lower battery life, companies like Apple and Google will be more than willing to make a switch.

According to ArsTechnica, the Snapdragon 1000 is already there in reference systems, which are laptops with fairly beefy hardware. The report notes that Snapdragon 1000 has a total power draw of 12W -- 3W less than the Intel U series processors -- and that in the reference laptops, the chip has been paired with 16GB RAM and two 128GB flash drives. It has been reported that currently Qualcomm is testing Windows 10 on the laptops running Snapdragon 1000.

Qualcomm is trying to push its processors in laptops for a while now. It all started with the Snapdragon 835, but the company really upped the ante when it launched the Snapdragon 845 in December last year. While promising "desktop-class" performance in mobile phones with the Snapdragon 845, Qualcomm also announced "always-connected" laptops that its partners would launch this year. These laptops will be powered by the Snapdragon 850, which is a higher-clocked Snapdragon 845 processor.

Unlike the Snapdragon 845 or the Snapdragon 850, the Snapdragon 1000 is reportedly based on the A76 cores recently announced by ARM. These cores come with new micro-architecture, which is tuned for more performance. This too hints that the Snapdragon 1000 may indeed get close to the Intel U processors, while at the same time being more power-efficient (longer battery in laptop) as well more cooler running.

It has been reported that the Snapdragon 1000 will have a package size of 20mmX15mm, which is significantly smaller than 45mmX24mm of Intel's U series processor. Also, unlike the Snapdragons inside the smartphones, the Snapdragon 1000 will be a socketed processor and not soldered. The processor will be built using 7nm process by TSMC.

It is not yet clear whether the Snapdragon 1000 will be available for phones or not, but chances are that it is going to be specific to laptops. With a TDP of 12W and given its large size, it will not be feasible to put it in a smartphone, although chances are that some of its performance-related features would be available in next-generation smartphone processor -- most likely to be Snapdragon 855 -- that Qualcomm will make for the phones of 2019.