Snapdragon X Elite announced: Qualcomm gets serious about laptop performance

Qualcomm has been dabbling in the laptop chipset market for a few years, but below-par performance has prevented the otherwise solid connectivity and AI benefits from cutting through. Following its acquisition of Nuvia in 2021 and subsequent development of the custom Arm-based Oryon CPU core, Qualcomm feels ready to duke it out with the performance leaders with its new chip — Snapdragon X Elite.

The heart of the Snapdragon X Elite consists of 12 64-bit custom Oryon CPU cores split across three clusters, with 3.8GHz clock speeds and a large 42MB total cache pool across the CPU (Qualcomm didn’t divulge cache specifics). One or two of these cores can hit 4.25GHz with boost mode enabled for additional single-threaded performance. The company claims this is the first CPU core “on Arm-based architecture” to surpass the 4GHz mark. Importantly, Qualcomm scales the performance point for both fan and fanless designs.

Qualcomm makes some bold performance claims versus the x86 competition regarding both performance and power efficiency, but we’ll wait to verify the claims with our numbers.

On the memory side, Qualcomm pairs the chip with an 8,533 MT/s LPDDR5X interface for up to 64GB RAM and 136GB/s of bandwidth. External connections can leverage high bandwidth too, with up to three USB 4 connections, two USB 3.2 Gen2 connections, and one eUSB interface supported. Storage options come in mobile SD 3.0 and faster UFS 4.0 flavors, as well as NVMe over PCIe Gen 4 for more typical laptop solutions.

Of course, this wouldn’t be a Snapdragon chipset without Qualcomm leveraging its broader component ecosystem. Adreno graphics make the jump with DirectX 12 for Windows and triple 4K monitor support. Qualcomm quotes a rather ambiguous 4.6TFLOPs performance statistic, insinuating number-crunching performance above the Apple M2 GPU, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into 3D performance. Not to mention that most games are built for x86. Either way, Qualcomm isn’t positioning this as a gaming chipset.

Artificial intelligence is the Snapdragon X Elite’s big claim to fame. The latest Hexagon NPU boasts 45 TOPs of calculation power, eclipsing the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3’s system-wide 29 TOPs figure. Qualcomm claims there’s sufficient power here to run on-device inferencing and generative AI, crunching through 30 tokens per second for the 7B Llama language model, which we believe is sufficient to run in real-time.

Rounding out the specs, H.264, HEVC, and AV1 hardware video decoding and encoding are supported, plus VP9 decode-only too. Likewise, there’s a familiar Qualcomm connectivity suite on offer here. Wi-Fi 7, 6E, and 6 options are available, along with Bluetooth 5.4, complete with LE Audio and Snapdragon Sound. Cellular connectivity is provided by a Snapdragon X65 modem, boasting 5G data up to 10Gbps down and 3.5Gbps up, with mmWave and sub-6GHz bands supported.

If all that hardware isn’t enough, the X Elite also supports Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon Seamless technology to more easily share content across your devices, such as next-gen smartphones powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. The first laptops powered by Snapdragon X Elite are expected to arrive in mid-2024.