'Qualcomm puts old QCS6490 chip in Snapdragon C for budget laptops'

The Snapdragon C processor, which should be the Windows answer to the CPU in the MacBook Neo, would be a repackaged older chip. While Apple uses the top model A18 Pro from the end of 2024 in its cheap laptop, Qualcomm would fall back on a midrange chip from early 2023.

The Snapdragon C is actually a QCS6490 in a new package, claims XDA-Developers. It was already known that the new C chip for budget laptops does not have the Oryon cores from Qualcomm's high-end Snapdragon X and Snapdragon 8 Elite processors. The Arm chipmaker itself has not yet announced any details, but according to the tech news site XDA-Developers it is a version of the QCS6490.

The Arm chip was released in March 2023 and is intended to serve for a longer period of time in different generations of devices and proprietary CPUs that Qualcomm's partners make. The QCM6490 version with built-in 5G modem is the basis for the Dragonwing processor in the NexPhone, a smartphone that runs Android, Linux and Windows. Manufacturer Nex Computer announced this device at the beginning of this year. The Fairphone 5, which was released in 2023, uses the same Qualcomm SoC.

Back to the beginning of 2021 even?

The QCS6490 and QCM6490 are based on the Snapdragon 778G, which was released in early 2021. Qualcomm will provide this chip design with updates until at least 2036. XDA-Developers notes that the specifications of the old chip do not necessarily apply to the Snapdragon C. This latest repackage may have been modified and have higher clock speeds, for example.