Faced with Apple’s unrivaled domination of the ARM laptop market, Qualcomm is responding with a new generation of chips, more efficient, more energy efficient and with advanced AI capabilities.
Crazy performance and crazy autonomy, Apple Macbooks have been monsters of power and energy efficiency since the switch to ARM architecture. And so far, the competition is having a hard time keeping up.
Can Qualcomm compete with Apple Silicon?
Qualcomm intends to give a serious boost to Windows ARM laptops thanks to its new Snapdragon X Elite chips, just announced as part of the Snapdragon Summit. The semiconductor giant promises a “huge leap forward” with these products, which could finally help to democratize Windows ARM PCs.
This is the trend of the moment, the American company has heavily emphasized the capabilities of its chips in terms of artificial intelligence, highlighting a Hexagon NPU with 45 TOPs. This would, among other things, be capable of running a generative language model taking into account more than 13 billion parameters at very high speed.
Another argument put forward by Qualcomm in favor of its Snapdragon X Elite: a significant increase in performance per watt. Enough to compete with the power of the best processors while consuming much less energy. PCs running Snapdragon
See you in 2024
Otherwise, we are dealing with 4nm engraving, an Oryon CPU with 12 cores, the most efficient of which are clocked up to 3.8 GHz (4.3 GHz boost), and an Adreno GPU developing up to 4 ,6 TFLOPs.
The LPDDR5x RAM has a bandwidth of 136 GB/s and the storage interface is UFS 4.0 and PCIe Gen 4 compatible. The chip is Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 compatible for wireless connectivity.
The first laptops equipped with Snapdragon X Elite were expected to be released in mid-2024. However, it is very possible that certain models will be presented before, during CES 2024 for example.
Source: Press release
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