Back in October, Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon X Elite chip, which aims to compete with Apple Silicon. Today, the company has introduced another offering from the Snapdragon X line – Snapdragon X Plus. As the name implies, it is a more affordable and slightly less productive version of the Snapdragon X Elite. Both chips are expected to become available for Windows-on-Arm laptops in mid-2024.
Qualcomm emphasizes artificial intelligence capabilities in new Snapdragon X series chips
The Snapdragon X Plus chip is equipped with a total of 10 custom Oryon processor cores from Qualcomm. According to the company, the processor provides a 37% increase in performance with 54% lower power consumption compared to “competitors”. However, the company did not describe its “competitors” in more detail.
Another aspect that Qualcomm emphasized is the chip’s powerful GPU and possible performance in AI-related tasks on the device. The Snapdragon X series chips are reportedly equipped with the “world’s fastest GPU for laptops.” The performance of the special Qualcomm Hexagon NPU is measured at 45 TOPS (trillions of operations per second), which, according to the company, will provide unprecedented performance, efficiency and artificial intelligence capabilities on Windows PC devices.
All these AI capabilities on the device are expected to allow developers to add a lot of new and interesting features to applications, which in turn will make life much easier. However, this requires more than just the right chips, and we will have to wait for the realization of these features.
Qualcomm demonstrated the AI capabilities of this chip by generating code in Codegen’s Visual Studio Code. This is a program designed to help developers generate new lines of code in real time using AI generated on the device. The company also demonstrated music generation from text prompts in Audacity and automatic speech translation into live subtitles in OBS Studio.
The Snapdragon X Plus chip recently appeared in the GeekBench ML listing, running on a mysterious device with 16 GB of memory. The device’s codename indicates that it could be a Surface laptop, the Surface Pro 10.
