Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X Elite Arm-based CPU for Windows laptops

October 25, 2023

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Qualcomm’s next Arm-based CPU, the Snapdragon X Elite for Windows laptops, has been announced at the ongoing Snapdragon Summit 2023. The Snapdragon X Elite, manufactured on a 4nm process, includes a 12-core Oryon CPU, Adreno GPU, and a specialised AI engine capable of running on-device generative AI models.

This 64-bit processor for Windows laptops has a 12-core CPU cluster with up to 3.8GHz, as well as a novel single and dual-core boost technology that boosts the CPU clock speed up to 4.3 GHz, making it one of the fastest Arm-based CPUs.

The graphics are handled by the Adreno GPU, which has a performance of up to 4.6 TFLOPs. In comparison, the Xbox Series S’s graphics unit can only provide up to 4 TFLOPs of graphics performance. Similarly, the chip has the Qualcomm Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU), which can compute massive language models with up to 13 billion parameters on-device.

The Snapdragon X Elite, in contrast to an X86 architecture-based CPU for Windows laptops, not only offers improved performance but also exemplary power economy, increasing battery life and, according to the manufacturer, providing multi-day battery life per charge.

According to the display output, which is a crucial component of a laptop, it is compatible with the eDP v1.4b standard and can support displays up to 4K resolution at refresh rates as high as 120Hz and as many as three external screens with 4K resolution or two with 5K resolution.

With up to 64 GB and eight channels, power-efficient LPDDR5x type RAM is compatible with the Snapdragon X Elite. Similar to that, it also supports NVME PCIe Gen 4 and UFS 4.0 storage standards.

The chip also incorporates enterprise-grade security, and with AV1 codec support, it should be able to handle high-resolution video encoding and decoding with ease.

Qualcomm appears to be thinking about emulating Apple’s success with Arm-based M1/M2 chips, which helped the company increase its market share in the personal computer area. In the following days, Qualcomm will collaborate with multiple PC OEMs to integrate its latest Snapdragon X Elite CPU.