Qualcomm's smartphone chips are great, but the company is also leading the charge with ARM laptop silicon as well, powering some of the best Chromebooks and laptops. Yet, some of its offerings have been due for an upgrade. The Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, one of Qualcomm's higher-end chips for laptops, was released in late 2021. We're due for a successor already — rumors about the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 have been floating for months. An engineering sample might have just been tested out in the wild, potentially letting us in on some key details about the upcoming chip, as well as on some (maybe) disappointing news.

An engineering sample of a "Snapdragon 8cx Next Gen" chip has apparently been benchmarked using Geekbench 5, with the results posted publicly and subsequently taken down (via Tom's Hardware). Benchmarks are usually really weak evidence on their own, both for the performance of chip and its likelihood of being released as tested. That being said, the chip is shown to feature an 8+4 hybrid core configuration, which matches the core layout that has leaked for this chip — past rumors have indicated that the 8cx Gen 4 might feature eight performance cores and four efficiency cores.

Unfortunately, if you were hoping to see how big of a performance jump there is compared to the 8cx Gen 3, you're out of luck. This benchmark is showing a single-core score of 613 and a multi-core score of 5241, meaning it's scoring lower than the 8cx Gen 3. If this is actually a legit benchmark of a legit engineering sample, this could be explained by the fact that this is, well, an engineering sample. It would have pre-release drivers, firmware, and the silicon itself might not even be a finalized design. The efficiency cores' frequency in this benchmark sits at 2.38 GHz, while the performance cores are sitting at 3 GHz.

We'll keep hearing more about this chip as we near its final release.