Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus SoC for Laptops Announced, Strategy Detailed

Qualcomm has been trying to break into the laptop and PC market with CPUs based on the Arm architecture for the past seven years, but 2024 should see some major disruption in the market which has almost exclusively been built on Intel and AMD’s X86 chips thus far. After having teased the performance of its upcoming flagship-grade Snapdragon X Elite SoCs, Qualcomm has now taken the wraps off a more mainstream Snapdragon X Plus model which will also be hitting markets around the world soon. This also means fresh competition for Apple, which now uses its own in-house M-series CPUs, also based on the Arm architecture.

The newly announced Snapdragon X Plus is claimed to deliver 28 percent better performance or 39 percent better power efficiency at the same performance level compared to an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, in the Cinebench 2024 multi-threaded test. GPU power is claimed to be 36 percent higher or 50 percent more power efficient at the same level. Qualcomm has also compared its offerings favourably to Apple’s current-gen M3 SoC. Real-world benchmark results will depend on each laptop OEM’s individual designs, Microsoft’s Windows 11 optimisations, and software vendors’ Arm support. 

The Snapdragon X range will be based on new, custom-designed Oryon cores, developed by the team that Qualcomm brought in-house when it acquired CPU startup Nuvia in 2021. Qualcomm has now unveiled more information, including its product segmentation strategy and naming convention. There will be three models in the Snapdragon X Elite range and one Snapdragon X Plus SKU for more affordable devices. The top-end Snapdragon X1E-84-100, X1E-80-100 and X1E-78-100 are all Elite tier parts with 12 CPU cores. Speeds range between 3.4GHz and 4.2GHz across this stack. The X1P-64-100 is positioned lower, with the Plus label meaning it has only 10 CPU cores. This leaves a lot of room for additional higher and lower-end configurations to be announced in the future. 

GPU clock speed scales depending on which model you get, but interestingly, all four chips have the same 42MB total cache capacity and 45 TOPS performance rating for their integrated NPUs, which will come into play for AI acceleration, one of Qualcomm’s biggest selling points. The company is calling this “the world’s fastest NPU for laptops”. All four support up to 64GB of LPDDR5X-8448 RAM. These chips will be fabricated on a 4nm TSMC process. 

Qualcomm promises class-leading GPU power, with support for up to a 4K 120Hz or 5K 60Hz display plus multiple external displays. AV1 video encode and decode is enabled in hardware. There’s also platform-level support for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, cellular 5G (paired with a Snapdragon X65 modem), PCIe 4.0 or UFS 4.0 storage, always-on sensors, and of course Qualcomm aptX audio. The integrated image signal processor can handle up to a 64-megapixel camera and 4K HDR video capture.

While the company has only said that Snapdragon X-based laptops are coming “mid-year”, Qualcomm CEO and President Cristiano Amon is scheduled to address a keynote at the Computex 2024 trade show in Taipei on June 4, making it likely that specific models will be shown off there. Microsoft’s Build conference is scheduled for late May, so additional details are also likely to emerge then. Acer, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Asus, Xiaomi, Samsung, Microsoft, and Honor are confirmed to be developing new Snapdragon X-based laptops, though launch dates are not yet known.