Snapdragon X Series

There's a buzz building around Qualcomm's forthcoming Arm-based chips, a new product line called the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Series that will launch in laptops in mid-2024. The chips will power so-called AI PCs and were unveiled at the company's annual conference in Hawaii in late 2023.

The chips are the latest volley in the attempt to move more Windows users onto Arm. While the operating system support is there, there have been performance and compatibility issues with the Snapdragon 8cx chips. Qualcomm says that Snapdragon X Elite and Plus will deliver far better efficiency with equivalent or better performance than competitors.

Qualcomm’s chip, using TSMC's 4-nanometer process on a single die, will have 12 "high-performance" Oryon cores on each chip going up to 3.8 GHz. However, of those 12 chips, the company says single- or dual-core boost up to 4.3 GHz is possible. The cores are batched into three clusters of four on the die. The chip will have up to 64GB of LPDDR5x RAM, with up to 136 GB/s of memory bandwidth, and 42MB of total cache.

Qualcomm is pushing the chip as having "best-in-class" multi-threaded CPU performance. The company showed journalists charts of performance compared to a competitor's 10-core and 12-core laptop chips, showing up to twice the performance in Geekbench 6.1 at one-third of the power. (Qualcomm didn't name the chips in its presentation, but later told me the 10-core chip is a Intel Core i7-1355U and the 12-core chip is a Core i7-1360P). Compared to a 14-core chip on the same test (later clarified as the Intel Core i7-13800H), Qualcomm showed significant improvements in performance per watt, and it suggested the Snapdragon X Elite gets up to a 60% performance improvement.