Last fall, Qualcomm revealed a major upgrade for its laptop chips While we’re still waiting for those processors to make their way into retail devices, Qualcomm is expanding its lineup today with the Snapdragon X Plus, which I had a chance to test before it arrives in gadgets later this year.
Like the X Elite, the X Plus is based on the same 4nm process and Arm like his brother. The difference is that the new chip is intended for use in slightly more affordable mainstream laptops, and therefore only has 10 CPU cores (vs 12 for the X Elite) and reduced clock speeds (3.4Ghz vs 3.8Ghz for the X Elite). ). This positioning is very similar to what Qualcomm’s rivals have been doing for some time, with the X Elite serving as the flagship chip (like Intel’s Core Ultra 9 series) and the X Plus sitting just below it (which is equivalent to the Core Ultra 7 line).
One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is that like the X Elite, the X Plus’ Hexagon NPU puts out the same 45 TOPS of machine learning performance. This is especially noteworthy as Microsoft Copilot states that laptops will require at least 40 TOPS to run the various elements of the AI service on the device. Qualcomm is also making some big claims about power efficiency, with the X Plus chip said to deliver 37 percent faster CPU performance than the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H when both chips run at the same wattage. When pitted against other Arm-based chips, Qualcomm says the X Plus is 10 percent faster than Apple’s M3 processor in multi-threaded CPU tasks.
Unfortunately, the X Plus isn’t expected to appear on retail devices until the second half of 2024. That said, in a hands-on event, I was able to run a few benchmarks on some early reference devices built by Qualcomm. And to my pleasant surprise, the X Plus performed as expected with a multi-core score of 12,905 on Geekbench and a multi-core performance of 852 on Cinebench 2024. (Note: Since the processor hasn’t been released yet, there is a bug in Cinebench that results in the chip’s GPU being incorrectly listed as X Elite instead of X Plus.)
It’s a promising demonstration for Qualcomm’s second and cheaper chip featuring the Oryon architecture. As always, though, the real test will come when the X Plus starts showing up in proper retail hardware. That’s because even with impressive benchmark numbers, these processors will still have to play nice with Windows, which doesn’t have nearly as smooth a transition to Arm-based silicon as Apple’s macOS.
But with updated support for Windows on Snapdragon PCs and Qualcomm recently working with major players like Google to “” things might be smoother this time around in Chrome for devices powered by laptop chips.
