Snapdragon X Plus CPUs Are Coming To Windows Laptops With Improved Battery Life In Tow
Six months after Qualcomm showcased the Snapdragon X-Elite series — the company's premium lineup of Windows-focused chipsets — the company has taken covers off the brand new Snapdragon X Plus lineup. In contrast to the X-Elite series, which is Qualcomm's top-of-the-line offering, the Snapdragon X Plus ecosystem is slightly less powerful, while also being a lot more affordable. Both chipset families are part of Qualcomm's renewed push towards Windows, and are claimed to be among the most powerful Windows-focused chipsets made by the company yet.
The newly announced Snapdragon X Plus chipsets feature Qualcomm's new 10-core, 4nm Oryon CPU that claims a 37% performance advantage over most of its competitors. Qualcomm also claims that this chipset consumes 54% less power than comparable Intel and AMD chips. Like the X-Elite series, the X Plus lineup also gets a powerful Hexagon Neural Processing Unit (NPU) capable of 45 TOPS, making it the fastest-ever NPU on a laptop yet. This NPU should enable a wide variety of use cases, ranging from code generation using Visual Studio, music generation in Audacity, to live captions in OBS Studio.
Other notable specs of the Snapdragon X Plus lineup include support for LPDDR5x memory, integrated graphics powered by Qualcomm's familiar Adreno GPU, and 42MB of total cache. Thanks to these specs, these chips may prove to be a viable option for power users, who have traditionally stuck to either Intel or AMD-based systems. As you would soon find out, most of Qualcomm's previous attempts in this space have not been quite successful.
The ARM vs. X-86 dilemma
Although MediaTek chips have a larger pie of the Android smartphone market these days, for most people in the West, Qualcomm is arguably the first name that comes to their minds when they think of smartphone chips. That said, Qualcomm has also been trying to make its presence felt in the Windows-powered laptops and notebooks space for a while now — albeit with very little success. The company's most recent Windows-focused SoCs, the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 and the Microsoft SQ2 chips — the latter designed specifically for the Microsoft Surface Pro X — didn't exactly sell all that well.
A major reason you do not hear about laptops powered by Qualcomm chips often is that they were notorious for compatibility and performance issues. This has to do with the fact that all chips designed by Qualcomm are based on the ARM architecture, which is markedly different from the x86 architecture used by Windows and Intel/AMD chips. This mismatch often meant poor optimization, and a barrage of various bugs and incompatibilities.
With Microsoft and Qualcomm working closely to iron out these issues, Microsoft's latest operating system — Windows 11 — is claimed to be devoid of most compatibility issues that plagued older versions of Windows. With these issues ironed out, Qualcomm's new ARM-based chips offer all the advantages offered by the ARM architecture — including greater efficiency and lower battery consumption, while still being very powerful.
Snapdragon X Plus laptops: When and where to buy?
According to Qualcomm, the first products based on the Snapdragon X Plus and Snapdragon X Elite chipsets will reach consumers starting in mid-2024. While we do not have the list of companies that would manufacture and sell laptops based on these chips, we expect participation from many of the leading players in the computing space. Additionally, while Qualcomm's own benchmarking results make these chips look interesting, it will be a while before anyone can independently verify the company's claims.
At launch, Qualcomm only had a single variant of the Snapdragon X Plus SoC, which goes by the model number X1P-64-100. This lone member of the X Plus family has a maximum clock speed of 3.4 GHz. Along with the X1P-64-100 chipset, Qualcomm also shared details about the three chipset options currently offered by the 12-core Snapdragon X Elite lineup.
These three chipsets include the X1E-84-100, clocked at 3.8Ghz and a dual core boost of 4.2 Ghz; the X1E-80-100, which has a lower clock speed of 3.4 Ghz and a slightly lower boost frequency of 4.2 Ghz. Lastly, we also have the X1E-78-100 chipset, which has a maximum clock speed of 3.4 Ghz with no dual core boost functionality.
As outlined earlier, once the first products based on these latest Qualcomm chips arrive on the scene, expect a significant change in the laptop segment currently dominated by Intel and AMD chipsets.