Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite is here to better most Intel laptops and catch Apple’s M2
Built with Oryon CPUs for more powerful computing.
In the market for a new Windows machine? You might want to hold out for a little longer. Qualcomm has shared details about its upcoming Snapdragon X Elite chipsets for PCs. The new chips use Oryon CPUs for some of the fastest speeds around. It’ll be a big upgrade for power inside your next desktop or laptop, and Snapdragon X Elite should perform better than most Intel laptops. The tech may even look to rival Apple’s M2-series of chips in the latest Macs.
Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite series of chips are SoC processors. This means that all the components are on the same board: CPU, GPU, the lot. It means things happen on your machine quicker, as components are closer together. Apple has been using chipsets just like these since it unveiled the M-series with the 2020 MacBook Air. And from these Mac machines, the benefits of SoC silicon are unrivalled, producing some of the fastest speeds around.
Snapdragon’s X Elite series are 4nm processor chips, shrinking things down to cram more in. For the new chips, Qualcomm will use 12-core Oryon CPUs – some of the latest available. This promises some impressive speeds when you start tackling work on machines using the new chipset. Qualcomm is also cramming in a neural processing unit and AI Engine. This is a dedicated bit of hardware designed to process AI tasks on-device. It’s quicker and more efficient, which should boost your performance even more. Senior VP, Don McGuire, describes it as “a quantum leap forward in performance and power efficiency.”
The new X Elite chipsets are more power efficient. Snapdragon reckons you’ll get 4.3GHz speeds and a memory bandwidth of 136 GB/s. It looks like you’ll get 2x better performance than comparable Intel chips, while using 68% less power. Of course, we’ll have to test this when we get our hands on new machines with the X Elite chips.
For now, we’ll have to settle for benchmarks. Snapdragon X Elite gets a single-core score of 1197 and a multi-core score of 9337. This is similar to Apple’s standard M2 chipset which scores 2642 and 9795, respectively. But it’s miles off the more powerful 2595 and 14197 scores M2 Max. It’ll be interesting to see how the new processors compare to Apple’s M series in the flesh, or Nvidia’s upcoming chips.
Looking to get a new machine with Snapdragon’s X Elite chipset? You’ll have to wait a little longer yet. While the chipset is compatible across a range of designs and form factors, manufacturers need to make these new machines first. Keep an eye out throughout 2024 for new computers sporting the X Elite power.
Connor Jewiss