It feels like Qualcomm is finally serious about pushing Arm-based Windows laptops because the latest announcement has placed the new Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus processors in the eyes of the public.
There’s one thing I need to make clear first – the chips feel like “team swapping” because they do not utilize the oh-so-popular hybrid architecture big.LITTLE which is created by Arm themselves while Intel/AMD/Apple are embracing it nowadays.
Instead, they are all “performance cores” A.K.A the big one. Starting with the X Elite, it hosts 12 cores with up to 4.2GHz of boost clock while the GPU is still the good ol’ Adreno with up to 4.6 TFLOPs of performance.
And who’s gonna forget the AI-related NPU in this AI era, handled by the part going by the name of Hexagon where some folks might know it as a DSP unit rather than an NPU. In any case, it provides 45 TOPs across all announced Elite SKUs.
As for the entry-level X Plus, it has its core counts reduced to 10 while having no Dual Core Boost feature, making its max multithreaded frequency at 3.4GHz. TFLOPs-wise, it is said to be at 3.8.
For a quick roundup of all similar points, the Oryon CPU will have a 42MB cache as well as memory support of up to LPDDR5X-8448.
Qualcomm also promised high-quality gen-AI support like code generation in VSC, creating music in Audacity, and providing live captions within OBS Studio – all the goodies that are super nice to have.
When can we see laptops equipped with these processors? Mid-2024 is Qualcomm’s answer and I do hope that Microsoft doesn’t screw up Windows 11 on Arm this time around.
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