Windows PCs can finally stand up to Apple Macs, Snapdragon X Elite processor revealed

Tomorrow will be Qualcomm’s annual Snapdragon Summit conference, where the company will present its new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 high-end smartphone chip and, above all, a completely new architecture for laptops. These chips, called Snapdragon X, were developed by the Nuvia team and the company acquired them for $1.4 billion in 2021. It consists of former engineers from Apple, Google, Intel and AMD.

Information about the company’s new “Orion” cores has been pretty thin so far, with only a few details leaked. But a day before the conference, we finally know everything about one of the processors that the company will announce. Thanks to a marketing image that includes everything you need to have in this regard.

Snapdragon X Elite promises more battery life to Windows PCs

The image confirms that Snapdragon is equipped with Hexagon NPU (Neural Processing Unit). 45 OVER (trillions of operations per second), i.e. A significant increase of 55% Compared to its predecessor 8cx Gen3 SoC.

Power efficiency is a critical factor for laptop users, especially those looking for an alternative to the traditional x86 architecture. Apple has already managed to deliver record battery life on its computers thanks to its M1 and M2 chips, and now it’s up to Windows PCs to do the same. Qualcomm claims this Snapdragon X Elite will offer similar performance but with only a third of the power consumption compared to its competitors.

However, these figures should be viewed with caution, as the exact point of comparison is not specified. Everything shows this Qualcomm bases various claims on Intel’s Raptor Lake 28W CPUbut the model was not announced.

The report shows that Snapdragon X Elite SoC will be released in laptops from different manufacturers in mid-2024. Therefore, this also confirms information in other reports stating that the chip will come after Apple’s M3s and therefore may be a little behind in terms of performance. However, this release will coincide with the announcements of competitors such as Intel’s Meteor Lake and AMD’s Strix Point processors, both of which are designed for next-generation mobile systems.