Qualcomm teases Snapdragon X with no mention of Elite — news of second chip could be coming on April 24

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Is Qualcomm ready to become an active competitor against AMD and Intel for notebooks?

Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite ARM64 CPUs
(Image credit: Qualcomm)

Qualcomm is teasing something big for next week surrounding its highly anticipated processors that will be featured in Windows 11 laptops. The company announced in an X post to "stay tuned for 4/24." We can't say for certain that we'll learn details about an additional member of the chip family, but whatever Qualcomm is announcing will be Snapdragon X-related.

So far, we had a hands-on experience with multiple Oyron-based SKUs in New York, with selected benchmarks showing it to exceed certain AMD, Apple M3, and Intel CPUs. As of now, it is too early to claim how many SKUs or series will be available, let alone real-world performance. According to a report, the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7, Thinkpad T14s Gen 6, and Samsung's Book4 Edge are some of the notebooks that will use the Snapdragon X Elite. It is speculated that Microsoft's upcoming Surface Laptop 6 will also use this chip. However, these new machines won't launch until mid-2024 at the earliest according to Qualcomm's previous guidance.

Regarding software, Google released Chrome for the ARM64 platform well ahead of the upcoming Snapdragon X Elite launch. Controlled demos in New York showed some AI tools like Audacity using its NPU. It is also advertised to be capable of running AI LLM models as it is "built for AI," according to Qualcomm. 

Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite SoCs feature 12 Oryon cores and are manufactured using TSMC's 4nm process. With this, the chipmaker can make impressive claims regarding its performance. One of the SKUs performs 54% faster than an Intel Ultra 7 155H in the Geekbench 6 single-threaded performance benchmark. It could run some games like Control, showing it achieved 40 fps during non-combat stages. While it may not necessarily feature enthusiast-grade graphics, it should be sufficient for light gaming. Graphics performance was shown to be better than the Apple M3 and the Ryzen 9 7940HS under specific benchmarks the company chose to show. However, it's easy to cherry-pick numbers to make a product look good in individual benchmarks. So, we'll have to wait until we have production hardware in hand to get a complete picture of the performance potential of Snapdragon X Elite (and other potential product families).

The Snapdragon X Elite was announced in 2023 for Windows notebooks, but it piqued many enthusiasts' interest over the past few months. Having a 64-bit Arm-based processor for Windows as a choice was attractive enough to gain attention, followed by the company's assurance about its performance. While it may not necessarily eat either AMD or Intel's mobile CPU market share (at least initially), having another option beyond the long-standing duopoly in the Windows space is always appreciated.

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Roshan Ashraf Shaikh
Roshan Ashraf Shaikh
Contributing Writer

Roshan Ashraf Shaikh has been in the Indian PC hardware community since the early 2000s and has been building PCs, contributing to many Indian tech forums, & blogs. He operated Hardware BBQ for 11 years and wrote news for eTeknix & TweakTown before joining Tom's Hardware team. Besides tech, he is interested in fighting games, movies, anime, and mechanical watches.

16 Comments Comment from the forums
  • JamesJones44
    I keep seeing people compare the 12 core X Elite to the base M3 (8 core), but that's like comparing a 7950x to an Intel 14700K. Sure they are in the same ballpark, but no one would consider those two to be equivalent equals to each other like the 7950x and the 14900k would be.

    The X Elite should be compared to the M3 Pro based on the rumors and the specs.
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    Is Qualcomm ready to become an active competitor against AMD and Intel for notebooks?

    The bigger question is "Is Microsoft ready to make ARM based Windows a proper thing and not just Windows RT 2.0.
    Reply
  • As of now, it is too early to claim how many SKUs or series will be available, let alone real-world performance

    Leaks have pointed out these SKUs in the pipeline.
    Snapdragon X Elite X1E84100Snapdragon X Elite X1E80100Snapdragon X Elite X1E78100Snapdragon X Elite X1E76100Snapdragon X Plus X1P64100Snapdragon X Plus X1P62100Snapdragon X Plus X1P56100Snapdragon X Plus X1P40100https://i.imgur.com/U773dDO.jpeg
    Reply
  • JamesJones44
    Alvar Miles Udell said:
    The bigger question is "Is Microsoft ready to make ARM based Windows a proper thing and not just Windows RT 2.0.
    IMO as someone who works with the Microsoft development stack (.NET) on an Apple Silicon Mac, the answer is they are ready this time. Back in the RT days compiling for ARM and x64 was a lot of work. Separate APIs, separate compilers, separate distribution and a somewhat different operating environment. These days for the mass majority of applications it will be write once, compile once and distribute once for both platforms with very little operating differences. This is even true outside of the .NET stack (Java, Go, Rust, etc. C compilers like LLVM, GNU, Clang, etc.), but a large majority of your day to day apps will use .NET (VB, C++, .NET, etc.) for Windows development and Microsoft has gone to great lengths to make ARM + x64 development seamless.
    Reply
  • shawman123
    JamesJones44 said:
    I keep seeing people compare the 12 core X Elite to the base M3 (8 core), but that's like comparing a 7950x to an Intel 14700K. Sure they are in the same ballpark, but no one would consider those two to be equivalent equals to each other like the 7950x and the 14900k would be.

    The X Elite should be compared to the M3 Pro based on the rumors and the specs.
    We have to look at device price. If its priced at M3 level we have to compare to M3. If its as expensive as M3 Pro then it should be compared to that. Plus its not just performance, but efficiency need to be seen as well. I am hoping its out in retail and we have independent benchmarks run.
    Reply
  • Notton
    Looking at the part numbers from leaks, I am guessing the X Plus is a step down from X elite?

    I hope they don't reduce the memory bus width. The X Elite is already at a paltry 136GB/s (128-bit, 8533)
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    JamesJones44 said:
    IMO as someone who works with the Microsoft development stack (.NET) on an Apple Silicon Mac, the answer is they are ready this time. Back in the RT days compiling for ARM and x64 was a lot of work. Separate APIs, separate compilers, separate distribution and a somewhat different operating environment. These days for the mass majority of applications it will be write once, compile once and distribute once for both platforms with very little operating differences. This is even true outside of the .NET stack (Java, Go, Rust, etc. C compilers like LLVM, GNU, Clang, etc.), but a large majority of your day to day apps will use .NET (VB, C++, .NET, etc.) for Windows development and Microsoft has gone to great lengths to make ARM + x64 development seamless.

    I've read a couple of early hands-on reviews from reputable sources and while the machines were in a fairly controlled environment, emulated software (that is, running through the translation layer) most appears to run smooth, so the primary thing will be price. If they follow the current gen of Snapdragon powered laptops then I don't hold out much hope for their success.
    Reply
  • Pierce2623
    Notton said:
    Looking at the part numbers from leaks, I am guessing the X Plus is a step down from X elite?

    I hope they don't reduce the memory bus width. The X Elite is already at a paltry 136GB/s (128-bit, 8533)
    There’s no way they think true laptop parts can get by on a 64 bit bus like cellphone chips.
    Reply
  • kealii123
    JamesJones44 said:
    IMO as someone who works with the Microsoft development stack (.NET) on an Apple Silicon Mac, the answer is they are ready this time. Back in the RT days compiling for ARM and x64 was a lot of work. Separate APIs, separate compilers, separate distribution and a somewhat different operating environment. These days for the mass majority of applications it will be write once, compile once and distribute once for both platforms with very little operating differences. This is even true outside of the .NET stack (Java, Go, Rust, etc. C compilers like LLVM, GNU, Clang, etc.), but a large majority of your day to day apps will use .NET (VB, C++, .NET, etc.) for Windows development and Microsoft has gone to great lengths to make ARM + x64 development seamless.
    This is on devs to actually compile their applications for ARM on windows. Unless Qualcomm makes a huge splash (I'm skeptical, the performance will only be roughly comparable to Apple M2, vendors will put them in shoddy laptop chassis, but the price will be on Apple's level) devs won't bother.
    Reply
  • JamesJones44
    kealii123 said:
    This is on devs to actually compile their applications for ARM on windows. Unless Qualcomm makes a huge splash (I'm skeptical, the performance will only be roughly comparable to Apple M2, vendors will put them in shoddy laptop chassis, but the price will be on Apple's level) devs won't bother.
    It's no real work on the developer, they add ARM64v8 to the compile tuple when they say "dotnet build" and that's it. Developers will do it, they do it already for 10s of 1000s of products easily searchable in GitHub.
    Reply