Qualcomm is reportedly working its way towards having the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 laptop chip ready for market. A new report has the chip entering the engineer sample stage ahead of further testing.The future Qualcomm laptop chip isn't expected to be ready until 2024 which means that it has plenty of time to get things ready. Now, NotebookCheck reports that developer and leaker Kuba Wojciechowski believes that Qualcomm has begun "early sample runs" with CPU cores running at 3GHz.

What's more, the same leaker claims that Qualcomm has already confirmed that the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 will run on TSMC's 4nm manufacturing process. However, it isn't yet known which one - there are three TSMC 4nm manufacturing processes in use, each more advanced than the last.

As for other specifications, it's thought that the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 will offer eight performance cored and four efficiency cores, with 36MB of L2 cache on offer. 12MB of system-level cache will also join support for up to 64GB of RAM.

It's also reported that the chip will support both NVMe and UFC 4.0 storage, while an Adreno 740 is set to take care of graphics.

Once Qualcomm does finally make the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 available to OEMs we can expect it to start popping up in ARM-based Windows machines. The overall performance of the chip will likely dedice which of those machines will carry it, however.