Watch out Intel, stay behind Apple, Qualcomm makes its most ambitious attempt to steal the laptop computing crown, launching Snapdragon X Elite, a brand new system on a chip (SoC) for Windows PCs.
The chip company announced the new SoC on Tuesday during its Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii. At the heart of the new silicon is Qualcomm’s Oryon CPU, which Qualcomm says is faster than both Apple’s M2 Max and Intel’s Core i9 in some benchmarks. Granted, the numbers Qualcomm showed were for single-threaded performance and on an undisclosed benchmark test. They also claim that at peak performance it uses “70% less power” than comparable chips from competitors.
Still, it’s not just the potential pure performance and power savings of the Snapdragon Qualcomm is positioning the chip as an AI wonder, which with its 75 Tera operations per second (TOPs) can perform AI models with 13 billion parameters on the device, according to Qualcomm.
The Oryon CPU is supported by a Hexagon Neural Processing Unit (NPU) and Qualcomm’s Adreno GPU, which Qualcomm claims can handle up to 4.6 teraflops.
Qualcomm also claims a battery life of “days”, which is likely made possible by the chips’ low-power 4nm process (although some may be surprised that Qualcomm hasn’t included a 3nm process CPU).
Systems shipping with the Snapdragon X Elite next year will support powerful and often advanced specs. On the camera front, it supports cameras with up to 64 MP sensors and 4K video recording. It’s also designed to work with Microsoft’s Windows Studio features (for things like portrait blur and eye tracking). The systems will have native support for 5G, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.
Although we’ll have to wait until next year for Snapdragon X Elite systems, we already know of one with Qualcomm’s powerful silicon: a Microsoft Surface laptop.
During the launch, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took the stage and praised the new processor’s native AI capabilities on the Windows platform: “The best experience for us is going to be Copilot… Copilot is going to be the Start button.”
Qualcomm has even bigger plans for the Snapdragon X Elite, promising that it, or a version of it, will make its way into cars and AR/VR applications. We asked a Qualcomm representative about the possibility of Snapdragon are used .”
Perhaps not coincidentally, Qualcomm’s official Snapdragon Maybe Apple knew what was coming, maybe it didn’t, but we’re clearly in for an interesting winter and early 2024 in the laptop computer components space.