After the release of Qualcomm's new generation of Snapdragon 8 mobile platform, many mobile phone companies have shouted "the first batch of launches equipped with Snapdragon 8 flagship machines" as a selling point. It is worth noting that at the end of the Snapdragon Technology Summit, Qualcomm launched the first generation of Snapdragon G3x game platform, and jointly released a game handheld developer kit with Razer, which is tantamount to opening a new journey for Qualcomm.
The first generation of Snapdragon G3x, which is a game processor created by Qualcomm for game handhelds, is close to the mid-to-high-end mobile phone processor in terms of performance, but it can play a greater potential than the mobile phone processor.
As we all know, the inside of the mobile phone is an inch of land and an inch of gold, and in this compact space there are 3 important heat sources, namely the battery, chip and screen, and the three components occupy a lot of space inside the mobile phone, and the space reserved for the heat dissipation system is very small, so many manufacturers are reducing the main frequency of the processor through the AI temperature control system.
But the game handheld is completely different, because the internal space of the fuselage is much larger than the mobile phone, so the game handheld has a very powerful cooling system, and a larger gap can be reserved between the battery, chip and the screen, that is to say, the game handheld can play the maximum potential of the chip. Therefore, the Snapdragon G3x is not only compatible with more games in terms of performance, but also has more room for development. In addition, Snapdragon G3x also integrates 5G baseband, so that the game handheld occupies an absolute advantage in network latency, connectivity, etc., so that it can easily cope with the upcoming outbreak of cloud games and other industries.
According to public data, Sony sold 100 million PS1s in 10 years, and Nintendo sold 93 million Switch in 4 years. Qualcomm has the ability to sell more game handheld kits than the smartphone business with hundreds of millions of units per year? Of course not! But we need to know that game equipment manufacturers do not make money from hardware devices, but the release of games! For Qualcomm, this is a whole new market.
Is the Qualcomm gaming platform limited to gaming handhelds?
According to the official introduction, the game handheld equipped with Snapdragon G3X can smoothly run 1080P resolution games at a refresh rate of 120HZ, and the 4K display can output a 144HZ 4K video signal. Although Qualcomm has not announced the specific performance of the Snapdragon G3X at present, it can be found from the test data run by the developers that it can run a 3A masterpiece with a large performance overhead like "Original God", that is to say, the level of G3x should reach the level of Snapdragon 860 and 870, but Qualcomm not only these, but also the new Snapdragon 8 of the 4nm process, what does this mean?
As we all know, there is a self-developed M1 processor in Apple, and it will be introduced to the iPad Pro, and it will also be introduced to the M1 version of the Macbook. In addition, Apple's 16-inch MacBook Pro top-of-the-top model has twice the performance of the M1 version of the Macbook, but it is still called M1 MAX, not M2. So technically, Qualcomm can improve the overall performance of the processor by improving the core of the CPU and GPU, so as to meet the future game content with different requirements for performance, such as PS5, Xbox consoles and online games.
In general, qualcomm and Razer jointly developed game handheld kit, the future may not be limited to game handheld and lightweight games, and Qualcomm has no reason not to create a game device manufacturers and game developers based on the Android ecosystem, and similar to Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, the important thing is that Qualcomm also has its own advantages, that is, Google, Xiaomi, Samsung and other friends. Although the game handheld kit equipped with the Qualcomm G3x game platform has not yet been listed, it will become an inflection point for Qualcomm in the future.