Qualcomm expands Snapdragon X line of laptop chips with Snapdragon X Plus and three versions of the Snapdragon X Elite - Liliputing (2024)

The first Windows laptops with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series processors are expected to launch in mid-2024 and Qualcomm has been making big promises about the kind of performance we can expect from those systems. But up until now the company has been relatively quiet about the specific chips that will be available to PC makers.

Now Qualcomm has revealed specs for the first three members of the Snapdragon X Elite line of chips, and the company has also introduced the previously unannounced (but rumored) Snapdragon X Plus chip for slightly cheaper, lower-performance systems.

All of the processors are 4nm chips that combine the company’s new Oryon CPU cores with a high-performance GPU and neural processing unit (NPU).

The Snapdragon X Plus has 10 Oryon cores with support for multithreaded speeds up to 3.4 GHz, while Snapdragon X Elite chips are 12-core processors. Two of the Elite chips also top out at 3.4 GHz in multithreaded performance, while the most powerful member of the family can hit speeds up to 3.8 GHz. And the two top-tier Elite-branded chips also have a “Dual Core Boost” feature that allows two of the cores to hit even higher speeds. This sounds like Qualcomm’s version of Intel’s Turbot Boost technology.

All of the chips feature 42MB of total cache, a 45 TOPS NPU for hardware-accelerated AI performance, and an Adreno GPU that Qualcomm says is fast enough to handle many Windows PC games at near native speeds, even if they haven’t been compiled for ARM architecture and have to run through an emulation layer.

Unlike the latest chips from Apple, Intel, and AMD, these new Snapdragon X processors don’t feature hybrid architecture with a mix of Performance and Efficiency CPU cores. Instead theyonly have high-performance cores.

But Qualcomm claims that its ARM-based Oryon CPU cores offer strong enough performance-per-watt to be competitive with the latest chips from rivals, and the company has shared some cherry-picked benchmarks which would seem to back that up in at least some circ*mstances, but we’ll probably need to wait for independent reviews to see if those synthetic benchmarks are indicative of real-world performance.

While Windows on ARM has been a thing for nearly a decade at this point, most Windows PCs with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips that have shipped to date have struggled with applications that aren’t compiled to run natively on ARM.

Qualcomm says that’s no longer an issue with its latest chips. It’s probably best to reserve judgement until devices start shipping, but Apple has clearly shown that it’spossible for ARM chips to outperform x86_64 processors under the right conditions. What remains to be seen is whether those conditions include “running on Windows 11.” Some folks remain skeptical.

But thereis at least good reason to believe that PCs with Qualcomm’s new chips will offer some advantages including long battery life, support for thin, light, and maybe even fanless designs, and one of the fastest NPUs available for consumer PCs at the moment, which could come in handy when using apps like OBS Studio (which can leverage an NPU for “live captions in 100 languages… in real-time during livestreams).

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