Qualcomm Snapdragon X To Repeat Apple’s Success?

Will Qualcomm Be Able to Replicate Apple’s Success and Transform the PC Market?

Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus SoCs for Windows laptops introduced. Emphasis on energy efficiency, but also on performance.

Qualcomm has introduced its Snapdragon X SoCs for Windows laptops.

The leak was correct: the company announced five SoC models, four of which belong to the X Elite lineup, and one is part of the X Plus lineup. Whether these will be expanded is unknown, but we previously heard that each will have four SoCs.

We should start with the new naming principle for chips that Qualcomm will use in this segment.

As we see, the names turned out to be quite cumbersome, and the last digits are not even needed yet, as they are reserved for future SoCs.

The parameters of all four platforms are actually quite similar, and there shouldn’t be a huge difference in performance. All X Elite models have a 12-core CPU, and the X Plus has 10 cores. All of these are new Oryon cores, based on the developments of the company Nuvia, which Qualcomm bought last year.

All SoCs have 42 MB of cache memory and an NPU with a performance of 45 TOPS. For comparison, the Core Ultra has 11 TOPS, and the Ryzen 8040 has 16 TOPS. Also, all new platforms support LPDDR5X-8448 memory.

There are few details about the Adreno graphics core, but its performance varies by SoC from 3.8 to 4.6 TFLOPS.

The platforms are manufactured using a 4 nm process and support PCIe 4.0 and UFS 4.0 memory, 120Hz 4K screens, DisplayPort 1.4, 4K decoding at 60 fps and encoding at 120 fps, cameras up to 64 MP, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, USB4, and contain a Snapdragon X65 5G modem.

Qualcomm also shared some tests. In particular, in Geekbench 6 in single-thread mode, Snapdragon X Elite (apparently the top X1E-84-100) scores 3227 points, which is on par with Core i9-13980HX and higher than Ryzen 9 7940HS and Apple M2 Max. Thus, the single-thread performance is really very respectable, especially considering the far from record frequencies. However, multi-threaded performance is usually more important, but Qualcomm does not share data on this. In any case, we still need to wait for the results in real applications, as we are still talking about the Arm architecture.

But this very architecture allows Qualcomm’s new SoCs to be very energy-efficient. At least, the company itself promises to smash the competitors in this indicator to smithereens.

AnandTech published test results of benchmark laptops on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 and Snapdragon X Plus X1P-65-100.

The results are quite good, although in multi-threaded mode in the same Cinebench 2024, Qualcomm’s new platforms are far from the top x86 processors, but we need to remember the power consumption. However, we also need to consider the price, and here we have no data at all yet.

Qualcomm promises laptops with new SoCs in the middle of this year. These PCs will be shipped with Windows 11 with the 24H2 update, which all other users will receive later.

Links

• Qualcomm announces Snapdragon X Plus and Elite processors – The Verge
• Sell your pre-owned smartphone online – iGotOffer

NEW Snapdragon X Plus vs Apple M3 – Qualcomm’s GENIUS Plan? [Video]

Video uploaded by Max Tech on April 26, 2024.