Qualcomm Reveals Snapdragon X Elite, Its Intel and Apple Silicon Killer

Qualcomm had been hinting at it for over a year, but finally, its Apple Silicon killer and rival to Intel's x86 CPUs for Windows has been unveiled. It is the Snapdragon X Elite, which will be released in mid-2024, and Qualcomm claims it is not only faster than the best of Apple and Intel on a laptop form factor but also significantly more efficient. While efficiency gains over Intel's x86 architecture were expected, the fact that Qualcomm's new Oryon CPU cores are faster than Apple's latest MacBook Pro models' M2 Max while consuming 30% less power is impressive. Of course, this is a system-on-chip (SoC) based on a 4nm manufacturing process by TSMC.

Qualcomm says the Oryon cores are faster than the Intel Core i9-13980Hx in single-threaded performance while consuming 70% less power. However, this claim is in comparison to the current generation Raptor Lake CPUs, not the incoming Meteor Lake processors that were announced at Intel Innovation.

Qualcomm claims that the Adreno GPU on the Snapdragon Elite X is 2x faster than Intel's Xe integrated graphics with just one-fourth of the power consumption. It is also said to be 80% faster than AMD's Ryzen 9 7940HS integrated GPU with 80% less power consumption.

Like Intel's new chipsets, Qualcomm is doubling down on the ability of its new chipset to run algorithms for generative AI on the device. The new Hexagon NPU can perform 45 TOPs and run generative AI models with over 13 billion parameters on the device. There is also a micro NPU in the sensing hub.

One area that hasn't been fully addressed is emulation technology. Most Windows apps are tuned to run on the x86 architecture, which has been a challenge in the past. While there is translation technology that converts x86 apps to ARM64, the performance has not been up to par. Apple overcame this issue with its Rosetta 2 translation layer when it moved from Intel chips to M series processors in 2020, and the performance was excellent.

Microsoft and Qualcomm have to bridge this gap. This may happen when Microsoft releases Windows 12 next year, as it has also hinted at a new Surface X successor that will be based on Qualcomm's new chipset.

This chip also incorporates the x65 modem, which is for 5G and LTE. Therefore, it seems like Qualcomm could have an advantage over Apple and Intel.

What's interesting is that this has happened after Qualcomm acquired a company called Nuvia in 2021. Nuvia was founded by ex Apple employee Gerald Williams who was the chief CPU architect for Apple's A series and M series of processors and worked even on the M1 Max chipset. Qualcomm incorporated technology that Nuvia created for high performance server chipset and that's why the Snapdragon X Elite has just 12 high performance CPU cores which is a very strange configuration for a power efficient system on chip (SoC).

Qualcomm has also been embroiled in a lawsuit with ARM, the creator of the instruction set that it uses in its chips. ARM believes Qualcomm cannot use the Nuvia license for ARM after acquiring it but has to get a new license.