On Wednesday, Qualcomm announced the upcoming launch of its Snapdragon X Plus laptop processor, as well as more information about its previously announced Snapdragon X Elite chips. While this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Qualcomm processors in a laptop, it is the first time the company could have a chip that can compete with Apple, Intel and AMD in terms of speed.
The Snapdragon X Plus is Qualcomm’s entry-level laptop chip. It has 10 cores, 42MB of cache, a maximum multi-threaded frequency of 3.4GHz, and an NPU with 45 tera operations per second (TOPS, or how many math calculations it can solve in a second) to power fancy generative AI applications to support. However, keep in mind that TOPS is an arbitrary measurement that can sound more impressive than it is because it does not necessarily take into account the nature or quality of these calculations.
The Snapdragon (TFLOP is also a mathematical measure; it’s a shorthand for how many trillions of floating point operations can be calculated per second. It’s also an arbitrary measure, but it sure sounds impressive!)
The chipmaker is also launching three Snapdragon X Elite processors with twelve cores and a maximum multi-threaded frequency of 3.8 GHz and an iGPU with up to 4.6 TFLOP. 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 needs it.
What’s most noticeable about these Arm processors is that they don’t have a hybrid architecture like Apple Silicon and Intel’s chips, which split their total number of cores into performance-oriented and efficiency-oriented cores. Both companies have touted this architecture as a great way to reduce power consumption and extend battery life, and it is. But Qualcomm says all of its Snapdragon cores are “performance cores” and claims they still beat Apple, Intel and AMD in performance, power efficiency and battery life – and that PC gaming should “just work” when using Windows on arm runs. even via emulation.
I was able to get some hands-on time with both the Snapdragon X Plus and Elite, running benchmarks and playing games. This was a tightly controlled hands-on demo that spanned several prototype (reference) laptops, and the programs available to “test” the new chips were selected by Qualcomm, so I wasn’t convinced that in practice these Snapdragons would be more powerful than what the other chip makers were offering, and I won’t be one way or the other until I get my hands on a finished product.
But damn, they seemed competitive. If I were an Intel Ultra Core, Apple M3 or AMD Ryzen 8000 series I would be worried. From the numbers I saw at the demo event, the Snapdragon was too close to pass up when I compared it to Intel’s Core Ultra 9 185H and AMD’s Ryzen 9 8945HS chip in both benchmarks could be called: single and multicore.
The only game I was able to try on a Snapdragon X Elite processor was control, but I was impressed with how smoothly it ran and how responsive it was via emulation. The graphics settings weren’t maxed out, but since I was playing with a controller and the frame rate averaged 30fps, it ran like a highly optimized console game.
I briefly mentioned this recently Vergecast, but I don’t think their alleged ability to run generative AI programs faster than Intel or other AI chips will be the glory of the Snapdragon X series chips. Apple has proven that putting an Arm-based SoC in a laptop can dramatically increase battery life, reduce power consumption, and run much cooler than Intel and AMD’s x86 processors. But Windows laptops have all the strange and unconventional form factors that would directly benefit from a chip that competes with Apple Silicon in terms of power, performance and thermals. Their greater potential is to take the innovative offspring of dual-screen and foldable laptops and help develop them into a giant beanstalk of an ecosystem. Until now, Microsoft has struggled to achieve this any convincing Windows Arm laptop.
Maybe they can do it this time.