Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon X Plus Platform for Windows Laptops – Qualcomm

While this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Qualcomm processors in a laptop, it’s the first time the company could have a chip that directly competes with Apple, Intel, and AMD in speed as well as battery life. In fact, the company itself has recently mentioned that its upcoming proposals outperform even Apple’s M3 SoC, which remains to be confirmed.

The Snapdragon X Plus is Qualcomm’s entry-level chip for laptops. It has 10 cores (instead of the X Elite’s 12), 42MB cache, a maximum multithreaded frequency of 3.4GHz, and an NPU with 45 TOPS (or how many math calculations it can solve in one second) which is expected to help the performance of gen AI applications which each computer will run. Of course, TOPS is an arbitrary metric that can sound more impressive than it is because it doesn’t necessarily take into account the type or quality of those calculations.

The Snapdragon X Plus also supports LPDDR5x memory with a maximum transfer rate of 8448 MT/s and has an integrated Adreno GPU with 3.8 teraflop performance.

Qualcomm will also release from next month the Snapdragon X Elite SoC with three twelve-core processors, with a maximum multithreaded frequency of up to 3.8 GHz and iGPU up to 4.6 TFLOPs. All three have the same NPU and support the same memory at the same speed as the Snapdragon X Plus. The top two SKUs feature what Qualcomm calls Dual-Core Boost, up to 4.2GHz, which sounds a bit like Intel’s Turbo Boost or AMD’s Turbo Core. These features dynamically adjust the processor frequency, providing more power to the processor only when it is needed.

All Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus chipsets for 2024

What stands out most about Qualcomm’s new chipsets for Windows PCs is that they don’t have a hybrid architecture like Apple’s and Intel’s processors, which divide their total number of cores into those dedicated to performance and those that are dedicated to efficiency. Both companies have touted this architecture as a great way to reduce power consumption and increase battery life. But Qualcomm says all of its new Snapdragon laptop cores are “performance cores” and claims they still outperform Apple, Intel and AMD’s offerings in performance, power efficiency and battery life. In addition, PC games should “work” with Windows on Arm, even through emulation with very good performance.

May is expected to be the month where we will learn everything about Qualcomm’s and Microsoft’s next bet, with the unveiling of the next “AI PC”. Microsoft is expected to elaborate at the Build 2024 conference on the next version of Windows on Arm that will power any system that incorporates one of Qualcomm’s new processors. In addition, most manufacturers are preparing to announce their own proposals that will incorporate one of the new chipsets, with Lenovo, Dell, ASUS and even Microsoft itself being among the first to launch such a model.