Snapdragon X Plus: ARM chip officially unveiled

As previously teased, Qualcomm presented its ARM chip yesterday. However, the Snapdragon X Plus is the little brother of the Snapdragon X Elite, which is to be used in efficient notebooks with powerful AI features.

Snapdragon X Plus: performance meets efficiency

Qualcomm has unveiled the Snapdragon X Plus, the little brother of the Elite model, which offers the same features but slightly less performance. The chip is manufactured using the 4 nm process and relies on 10 performance cores with clock speeds of 3.4 GHz and a cache of 42 MB.

Like the Snapdragon X Elite, it relies on a 45 TOPS NPU for AI applications and should therefore achieve unprecedented AI performance. But that’s not all. According to Qualcomm’s presentation, the chip based on Oryon, which has two fewer computing cores than the Elite, is nevertheless said to be a match for the competition in terms of multi-core CPU performance.

In Geekbench 6, the manufacturer attests the Plus model 10 percent more performance than is possible in the Apple M3, while the Snapdragon X Elite even achieves 28 percent more performance. However, Apple is still ahead in the single-core test.

However, the performance compared to the Intel Core Ulta 7 155H and AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS is also more than impressive. Once again in Geekbench, the X Plus is said to work up to 37 percent faster with the same ISO power and achieve the same performance of its competitors with 54 percent less energy consumption.

Cinebench 2024, on the other hand, shows up to 28 percent more performance and up to 39 percent less energy consumption with the same performance. But even with the GPU performance of the Adreno GPU, here in the case of 3DMark WilfLife Extreme, the performance increase with the same ISO power is 36 percent with 50 percent less power consumption.

Strong feature set

But beyond raw performance, the Snapdragon X Plus with the X1P-64-100 designation also has a strong feature set. It is capable of playing internal displays in 4K UHD resolution at 120 Hz and HDR, as well as driving three external 4K displays including HDR at 60 Hz. Two 5K displays with 60 Hz are also possible. The GPU has a performance of 3.8 teraflops, which is roughly the same performance as the Xbox Series S.

Wi-Fi 7 and 5G are also supported for transfer speeds of up to 10 GB/s. Snapdragon Sound ensures lossless audio signals including Bluetooth 5.4 with Qualcomm Aqstic audio and Qualcomm aptX audio.

The Snapdragon X Plus is also scalable and can therefore be adapted for a wide range of notebooks and from factors. According to leaks, it will be used in the Microsoft Surface Pro 10, among others, and – as in other notebooks – will form a powerful, affordable and efficient Windows-on-ARM platform.

The first devices with the chip are expected at the same time as the more powerful Snapdragon X Elite in mid-2024, after the faster chip is unveiled at Computex 2024 in early June. Further details can be found on Qualcomm’s official product website.