Last fall, Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon test drive before it appeared on gadgets later this year.
Similar to the X Elite, the X Plus is built on the same 4nm process and Arm-based as its siblings. The difference is that the new chip is intended for use in slightly cheaper mainstream laptops and therefore only has 10 CPU cores (versus 12 on the X Elite) and reduced clock speeds (3.4 GHz versus 3.8 GHz on the X Elite ) has ). This positioning is largely similar to what Qualcomm’s competitors have been doing for some time, with the X Elite acting as the flagship chip (like Intel’s Core Ultra 9 series) and the . 7 line).
What hasn’t changed, however, is that just like the X Elite, the X Plus’s Hexagon NPU offers the same 45 TOPS of machine learning performance. This is particularly notable since Microsoft says laptops would need at least 40 TOPS to run various elements of its Copilot AI service on the device. Qualcomm is also making some big claims about energy efficiency: The X Plus chip is said to deliver 37 percent faster CPU performance compared to an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H when both chips run at the same wattage. And compared to other Arm-based chips, Qualcomm says the X Plus is 10 percent faster than Apple’s M3 processor at multi-threaded CPU tasks.
Unfortunately, the X Plus isn’t expected to hit retail units until sometime in the second half of 2024. However, at a hands-on event I was able to run a few benchmarks on some early reference devices built by Qualcomm. And to my pleasant surprise, the (Note: Because the processor hasn’t been released yet, there is an error in Cinebench that causes the chip’s GPU to be incorrectly listed as from the X Elite instead of the X Plus.)
This is a promising result for Qualcomm’s second and cheaper Oryon architecture chip. However, as always, the real test will come when the X Plus launches in the proper retail hardware. Because even though they have impressive benchmark scores, these processors still have to play well with Windows, which hasn’t transitioned to ARM-based silicon nearly as smoothly as Apple’s macOS.
But with renewed support for Windows on Snapdragon PCs and Qualcomm’s recent collaboration with big players like Google to bring “” to Chrome for devices with its laptop chips, things could run more smoothly this time.