During Qualcomm’s Keynote at Computex 2024, its CEO Cristiano Amon, has reemphasised that Qualcomm is restoring performance leadership to the Windows PC ecosystem with its Snapdragon X Elite chip. The Snapdragon X series is an ARM-based chip which is expected to take on the likes of the Apple M3 with superior performance and power efficiency.
Standing together with its partners from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and Samsung, Qualcomm says they are celebrating an industrial shift with a variety of new devices that are capable of delivering Copilot+ PC experiences enabled by the world’s fastest and most efficient NPU for laptops. Amon equates the transition as significant as the transition to Windows 95.
At the moment, the Snapdragon X series is the exclusive platform to launch Copilot+ PCs, a new category of Windows laptops that offer advanced AI features powered by NPU.
As mentioned during last year’s Snapdragon Summit, the 4nm Snapdragon X Elite is their most powerful computing processor ever for PC with best-in-class performance, on-device AI and multi-day battery life.
The key differenciator is the NPU. Amon says PCs powered by Snapdragon X series are superior and makes Copilot+ experiences possible. It offloads AI workloads from the CPU and GPU to the NPU, which significantly boosts performance while significantly improve battery life.
The Snapdragon X Elite’s NPU claims to deliver up to 45 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) for AI tasks including on-device generative AI. It also boasts leading performance per watt for laptops with up to 2.6x versus an Apple M3 and up to 5.4x versus an Intel Core Ultra 7.
With a 12-core Qualcomm Oryon CPU, the Snapdragon X Elite boasts up to 51% faster CPU performance at ISO power and it matches the competitor’s peak PC performance at 65% less power. The NPU also claims to offer over 5x higher performance at lower thermals with sustained performance even after one hour of continuous NPU usage.
Another key highlight is its battery life which is to be expected from an ARM-based chip. The Snapdragon X Elite claims to provide longer battery life of up to 60% for video playback, up to 70% for video calls and 2x longer for video streaming. These figures are compared to a similarly configured laptop running on an Intel Core Ultra 7.
During the keynote, Amon also showcased the chip’s performance for day to day applications such as a web browser. For Chrome, the Snapdragon X Elite is 20% faster than the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and 39% faster than an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS. Meanwhile, for Microsoft Edge, it performed 57% faster than the Intel and 35% faster than the AMD chip.
The new series of Snapdragon X-powered Copilot+ laptops will be available starting 18th June. However, for Malaysia, the new devices are expected to arrive sometime in Q3 2024.
