Qualcomm is preparing to revolutionize the Windows laptop market with new Snapdragon X Elite processors, and we already know everything about one of the chips that promises to shake Apple.
Tomorrow will be Qualcomm’s annual Snapdragon Summit conference, where the company will present its new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 high-end smartphone chip, but above all a completely new architecture for laptops. Called Snapdragon X, these chips were developed by the Nuvia team, the company bought for $1.4 billion in 2021 and made up of former engineers from Apple, Google, Intel and AMD.
Information about the company’s new “Oryon” cores has been pretty thin so far, with only a few details leaking. However, the day before the conference, we finally already know everything about one of the processors that the company will unveil thanks to a marketing image that contains everything you need to have about it.
The Snapdragon X Elite promises Windows PCs with even more battery life
The image confirms that the Snapdragon It is equipped with the Hexagon NPU (Neural Processing Unit), capable of performing 45 TOPS (trillions of operations per second), i.e. remarkable increase of 55% compared to its predecessor, the 8cx Gen3 SoC.
For laptop users, especially those looking for alternatives to traditional x86 architecture, power efficiency is a critical factor. Thanks to its M1 and M2 chips, Apple has already managed to offer record battery life on its computers, and it will now be up to Windows PCs to do the same. Qualcomm claims that The Snapdragon X Elite will offer similar performance, but with only a third of the power consumption compared to its competitors.
However, the exact point of comparison is not specified, so these figures should be viewed with caution. Everything suggests that Qualcomm bases its various claims on a Raptor Lake 28W CPU from Intelbut the model is not disclosed.
Also read – Powerful processors can quickly cost you a lot of electricity
The graphics part will be more powerful than an Xbox Series S
The Snapdragon X Elite’s graphics processor, called Adreno GPU, promises to be very efficient and will offer an impressive computing power of 4.6 TFLOPs, probably based on FP32 (single precision) operations. This level of graphics performance implies capabilities even greater than those of the Xbox Series S (4 TFLOPs), which is powered by AMD RDNA2 architecture. Like its predecessor, the 8cx Gen3, the Adreno GPU will support DirectX 12.
In terms of memory and storage, the SoC should be compatible with LPDDR5X-8533 standard, supporting up to 8 channels of 16-bit width, resulting in a maximum bandwidth of 136 GB/s and the ability to accommodate up to 64 GB of memory. This is an improvement over the previous generation LPDDR4x-4266 specifications.
Connectivity options have also been improved. The new chip will support Wi-Fi 7 standards and Bluetooth 5.4, an improvement over the Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 capabilities of the current generation chip. Additionally, the Snapdragon X Elite’s video processing unit will support AV1 codec encoding and decoding.
The report indicates that The Snapdragon X Elite SoC will launch in mid-2024 in laptops from different manufacturers. This therefore corroborates information from other reports which also indicated that the chip would arrive after Apple’s M3s, and could therefore be slightly behind in terms of performance. However, this release will coincide with announcements from competitors such as Intel’s Meteor Lake and AMD’s Strix Point processors, both designed for next-generation mobile systems.