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.
