Last week we saw the announcement of Qualcomm’s first post-Nuvia laptop SoC design, the Snapdragon X Elite. A new brand name being anchored by a new, custom Qualcomm CPU core, the Snapdragon X Elite will be Qualcomm’s most aggressive entry into the laptop SoC market to date, with Qualcomm dedicating far more in the way of engineering resources – and marketing resources – into developing their latest generation Arm SoC for Windows laptops. Backed by Qualcomm’s custom Arm CPU core, Oryon, the company is aiming to make the Snapdragon X Elite a watershed moment for the Snapdragon brand, both carving out a piece of the lucrative Windows laptop market while also setting the stage for a generation of even more powerful smartphone SoCs in 2024.
As outlined in the company’s keynote and related announcements at last week’s Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm is incredibly proud of (and gung-ho on) the Snapdragon X Elite, and they are eager to show off what it can do. With benchmark scores that, in some cases, are beating some of the best chips from Intel, AMD, and Arm, Qualcomm believes they have a hot hand with the Snapdragon X Elite, and they want to show it off as soon as possible. Even despite the fact that actual retail devices won’t be available until mid-2024 – at least another 6 months from now.
As part of that promotional push, alongside the public disclosures at last week’s event, Qualcomm also held an embargoed event for press and analysts to further demonstrate the Snapdragon X Elite and its performance. In a closed-door benchmarking session, the company set out a series of Snapdragon X Elite reference design laptops pre-loaded with popular benchmark software, most of which the company had also used in its performance claims from last week’s keynote sessions. The purpose of the session was to demonstrate in front of the gathered crowd that Qualcomm’s reported benchmark scores were no exaggeration or anomaly, and that the company had devices up and running right now that could hit those chart-topping scores. As the saying goes, “seeing is believing,” and Qualcomm’s benchmarking session was all about making sure the Snapdragon X Elite was being seen in action.
