2023 has been a fascinating year, especially for the smartphones and PC industries. In yet another recent news, Qualcomm announced their first PC processor at the Snapdragon Summit 2023 event, called the Snapdragon X Elite.
The Snapdragon Summit 2023 is a three-day event from the 24th to the 26th of October. At the same event, we saw Qualcomm announcing the latest mobile processor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
About the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite
The Snapdragon X Elite is powered by the all-new Oryon CPU by Qualcomm. The chip consists of 12 cores, with the frequency clocked at up to 3.8 GHz. The single-core and dual-core boost frequency goes up to 4.3 GHz. Additionally, the chip packs an integrated Adreno GPU with strength for managing up to 4.6 TFLOPS. Besides that, the chip is based on a 4nm process and ARM architecture. For some context, Intel’s latest and greatest offering is based on a 10nm process called the Intel 7 process.
Qualcomm has also focused on the artificial intelligence-based computing of the chip as well. The Snapdragon X Elite features the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU (Neural Processing Unit). Qualcomm promises up to 4.5 times faster AI processing power than the competition.
Moving forward, Qualcomm has not held back on other aspects of the chip as well. The Snapdragon X Elite supports LPDDR5x RAM up to 64GB. On top of that, there is also support for NVMe PCIe Gen 4 and UFS 4.0.
The cherry on top of all of this is the supported connectivity standards. Qualcomm has ensured that the Snapdragon X Elite chip sports the latest standards. For instance, there is support for 4G LTE and 5G, Bluetooth 5.4, and WiFi 7. One thing to note is that Thunderbolt 4 and 5 are not supported since they are Intel technology. We do have alternatives, though. The chip supports up to USB 4.0.
Qualcomm Promises Strong Numbers
A tech launch event is not complete with a comparison from the competition. Qualcomm claims that, in their testing, the Snapdragon X Elite can perform up to 2 times faster than 13th Gen Intel Core i7 processors in a multi-threaded benchmark test, with the same amount of power consumed.
They also claim it can reach the peak single-threaded performance of the competing Intel Core i9-13980HX chips at about 70% less power consumption. If that turns out to be true, it would mean phenomenal battery life on laptops.
Not just that, Qualcomm has made a bold claim that the Snapdragon X Elite is up to 50% faster than the Apple M2 chip when it comes to multi-thread performance.
In addition to that, it can also apparently beat the Apple M2 Max chip in single-threaded performance and match its peak performance with 30% less power consumed.
And the big numbers do not stop there. The Adreno GPU, constituting the Snapdragon X Elite chip, delivers up to 80% faster GPU performance than the AMD Ryzen 9-7940HS. Moreover, it can reach the peak performance of the AMD competitor with 80% less power consumed.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite integrated graphics offer twice the performance of Intel’s Core i7-13800H integrated graphics at the same power consumption while consuming 74% less power to deliver the same peak performance.
When will we see PCs powered by the Snapdragon X Elite?
How good the above claims hold up can only be seen when consumers and reviewers actually get the product. While there is no specific date, the expected time of arrival for PCs powered by the Snapdragon X Elite chip is around the half of 2024, as per Qualcomm. If Qualcomm delivers on its promises, we will finally have more competition in the PC processor market.
