On April 24, 2024, Qualcomm announced the launch of the long-awaited Snapdragon X Plus SoC. The chipset promises exceptional performance while maintaining higher efficiency levels. In other words, the X Plus and the X Elite could do for Windows laptops what Apple Silicon did for MacBooks.
Snapdragon X Plus Specifications
In the official press release, Qualcomm mentions that the Snapdragon X Plus delivers up to 37 percent faster CPU performance while consuming up to 54 percent less power than competitors. Now, this is a huge claim, especially since it points toward chips manufactured by companies like Apple, Intel, and AMD.
Regarding specifications, the Snapdragon X Plus chipset sports 10 cores, with a max multithread frequency of 3.4GHz. It also has a 42MB total cache. Unlike Apple’s M series or Intel chipsets, the 10-core Oryon CPU doesn’t have a hybrid architecture.
Snapdragon X Plus Vs. Apple M3: What Is Hybrid Architecture And How Does It Affect Performance?
Qualcomm says that all the processor’s cores are performance cores. For the uninitiated, here’s a quick explanation of a hybrid architecture on a CPU. In the context of processors, a hybrid architecture refers to a design combining two types of cores: performance and efficiency.
While the former is optimized for delivering high processing power, the latter is designed to remain power-efficient by handling lighter tasks. In this way, processors balance performance and battery life by switching between the available cores, depending on the workload.
For instance, Apple Silicon chips use this type of architecture, which enables them to achieve exceptional levels of efficiency. However, contrary to this approach, Qualcomm depends on all Snapdragon X Plus SoC performance cores.
Snapdragon X Plus: NPU And Memory
The Qualcomm chip comes with Hexagon NPU, which is capable of performing 45 tera operations per second to assist AI-based features. The company claims it to be the fastest NPU for laptops, an outright comparison with the neural processors on its competitors’ chipsets.
Beyond this, the Snapdragon X Plus chipset supports LPDDR5x RAM (maximum transfer rate of 8448 MT/s) and features a 3.8 TFLOP Adreno graphics processor, which sounds quite impressive. According to a report by The Verge, PC games should work on Windows laptops based on the chipset, even via emulation.
Snapdragon X Plus And Elite Beats Apple M3 In Multi-Core Performance Scores
The report also mentions that Snapdragon X Plus and Elite didn’t beat the Apple M3 in terms of single-core processing on Geekbench 6 and Cinebench 2024. However, the Snapdragon chipsets performed well in the multi-core test.
In theory, this should mean that laptops using the processor should be as good as those featuring the M3 chipset, but there’s a lot more that goes into a computer, and before a final product ships, it would be tough to comment on this.
With the Snapdragon X Plus, Qualcomm released three X Elite variants, each with 12 cores but slightly different specifications. Original equipment manufacturers will start pushing PCs powered by the new processor in mid-2024.
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