Qualcomm teased last week an announcement about the rumored Snapdragon X Plus, a budget-friendly version of their upcoming ARM chipset, and the rumors turned out to be true.
On Wednesday, the San Diego-based tech giant released the lower-end Snapdragon X Plus chip with a 10-core CPU, which the company states will "[power] the next generation of AI PCs."
The addition of the X Plus chip brings the number of SKUs in the Snapdragon X chipset family to four. Three Snapdragon X Elite chip versions include 12 cores supporting dual-core boost frequencies.
If there's ever a time for ARM processors to take over the Windows laptop market, this is it.
Four chip breakdown
Qualcomm released the complete breakdown of its different processor SKUs as part of the announcement, revealing that the four chips of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X platform family all have a CPU cache of 42 MB, 45 TOPS of NPU performance, and LPDDR5x memory slots.
The high-end Snapdragon X Elite XIE-84-100 will be a 12-core CPU with a multithreaded frequency of 3.8 GHz, a dual-core boost clock rate of 4.6 GHz, and 4.6 TFLOPs of Adreno GPU performance.
The mid-end Snapdragon X Elite XIE-80-100 will be a 12-core CPU with a multithreaded frequency of 3.4 GHz, a dual-core boost clock rate of 4.0 GHz, and 3.8 TFLOPs of Adreno GPU performance.
The lower-end Snapdragon X Elite XIE-78-100 will have a 12-core CPU with a multithreaded frequency of 3.4 GHz and 3.8 TFLOPs of Adreno GPU performance. It will not have a dual-core boost.
The entry-level Snapdragon X Plus XIP-64-100 will have a 10-core CPU with a multithreaded frequency of 3.4 GHz and 3.8 TFLOPs of Adreno GPU performance. It will not support dual-core boost frequencies.
Crucially, the Snapdragon X Elite series of chips can run generative large-language AI models locally on devices. The Plus chip doesn't support generative AI on devices, but it does enable "AI productivity tools that assist with your workflows, save valuable time, and make multitasking a breeze," the company says.
The future of ARM on Windows
With the Snapdragon X Elite and the Snapdragon X Plus, Qualcomm's Snapdragon platform is slated to be the most powerful ARM chipset, with dedicated AI PC features and as much as 45 TOPs of NPU performance. The Snapdragon X Plus will be a more budget-conscious option that could lead to cheaper Windows ARM laptops hitting the market this year.
With an exclusive Windows 11 AI feature on Snapdragon X Elite PCs, Microsoft is heavily relying on the Snapdragon X chipsets for its latest generation of Surface devices. Having exclusive Snapdragon X features helps confirm that the future of Windows 11 is tied to ARM processors, at least for now.
Intel has the Lunar Lake AI chipset in the works, currently expected for a Fall 2024 launch. This could throw a nice wrench in Microsoft and Qualcomm's plans for Windows ARM supremacy. AMD has also been pushing its AI PC offerings to greater neural processing heights, so we'll have to see how things shake out over the next few months.
