Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus chip announced, to rival Intel Core Ultra, Apple M-series chipsets

For long, Intel and AMD have dominated the chipset space for laptops and desktops. Apple also stepped into the space with its in-house M-series chipsets. Meanwhile, Qualcomm has primarily been known for chipsets powering smartphones and other mobile devices.

However, the brand is now looking to make chipsets to power PCs as well, starting with the newly announced Snapdragon X Plus chip, which is set to power both laptops and desktops, and bring on-device functionality. Here’s all you need to know about it.

Snapdragon X Plus: Performance

The new Snapdragon X Plus CPU packs a 4nm Qualcomm Oryon CPU, which gets six high-performance cores and four efficiency cores, with a peak clock speed of up to 3.4 GHz. The company claims that the chipset delivers speeds up to 37 per cent faster, while also being up to 54 per cent more efficient as compared to its competitors. 

AI capabilities on board the Snapdragon X Plus

Now, the competitors in question, such as Intel’s Core Ultra chipsets, also get on-board generative AI capabilities. Bearing in mind the same, the Snapdragon X Plus chipset gets an NPU capable of 45 TOPS, or tera operations per second.  

ALSO READ: Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chip announced; to power Samsung’s mixed reality headsets 

TOPS is a measure of the peak AI inferencing power of a chipset, and one TOPS essentially stands for one trillion operations per second. The Snapdragon X Plus chipset is capable of 45 trillion such operations per second, making it capable of handling extremely demanding generative AI tasks as well. 

The Snapdragon X Plus comes with a dedicated Qualcomm AI Engine, which supports Windows Studio Effects, Copilot, and Live captions in OBS studio with automatic transcription and translations in over 100 languages, music generation in Audacity, and many more. 

Snapdragon X Plus: GPU

The Snapdragon X Plus comes paired with an Adreno GPU, which the company claims delivers 36 per cent better performance and consumes up to 54 per cent less power than its rivals. Additionally, the GPU can also perform 3.8 Teraflops (One Teraflop translates to one trillion-floating point operations in a second. This is essentially a measure of a computer’s ability to perform complex mathematical calculations with precision). 

Snapdragon X Plus: What else you need to know

The Snapdragon X Plus chipset supports up to three 4K HDR display monitors connected to a PC at any given time. For audio, there is the Snapdragon Sound Technology Suite on board, with support for hi-res audio. 

ALSO READ: Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 chipset confirmed: here’s all you need to know 

There is also LPDDR5X RAM support, as well as Wi-Fi 7 support, with peak speeds of over 40 Gbps. There’s also a Snapdragon X65 5G cellular modem, which supports peak download speeds of up to 10Gbps and peak upload speeds of 3.5Gbps.  

Which laptops and desktops could we see sporting the Snapdragon X Plus chipset?

The Snapdragon X Plus chipset will compete with Apple’s M3 chipsets, as well as the Intel Core Ultra processors. While rumour has it that the processor could first be seen on Microsoft’s new lineup of Surface laptops and tablets, expected to debut globally next month, Qualcomm has not confirmed any partner OEMS expected to launch laptops and desktops with the chipset yet.