Meet Qualcomm’s New Snapdragon X Elite And Snapdragon X Plus SoCs
UPDATE: Per The Verge, Qualcomm confirms all cores within Snapdragon X chips are Performance Cores. Original article follows.
Meet Qualcomm’s New Snapdragon X Elite And Snapdragon X Plus SoCs
It’s official – Qualcomm has now unveiled the Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus series of SoCs (system-on-a-chip) after the teaser last week. The announcement reveals three new Snapdragon X Elite chips, and one new Snapdragon X Plus chip sitting below the Elite family.
Here are the basics: the Elite and Plus are mostly similar, but there are a few key differences in core count, and clock boosting. The Elite chips come with 12 cores for all three models revealed thus far – which includes the X1E-84-100, X1E-80-100, and X1E-76-100 – and the two higher-end chips get something called “Dual core boost”, which allows the flagship ’84’ chip to boost up to 4.2GHz on its best pair of cores.
Meanwhile, the X Plus currently has a single model, X1P-64-100, and comes with two fewer cores, no dual core boost, but retains the same NPU capable of delivering 45 TOPS of AI compute performance. All four chips come with LPDDR5X-8448 memory support.
However, Qualcomm made no details on how its Adreno GPUs are constructed, as the only metric given is the compute performance in TFLOPS – ask anyone enthusiastic about the PlayStation vs. Xbox debate on the Internet and they will convince you that TFLOPS do not matter as much as the core count and clock speeds. We only know it’s 3.6 TFLOPS for all chips short for the flagship ’84’ model (at 4.6 TFLOPS).
Also noteworthy is the lack of CPU configuration information. Both Intel and AMD publicize their processor’s core layout, but here Qualcomm has made zero mentions of whether the 12 cores in X Elite or the 10 cores in X Plus are all the same, full-size Performance cores, or there are some amount of Efficiency cores involved that the company fails to disclose. The same goes for cache sizes, all models get 42MB, but it’s unclear how much of that is L3, L2, or even the lower-level ones.
In any case, the chipmaker has provided first-party benchmarks of the Snapdragon X Plus with some pretty ambitious numbers. The chipmaker touts 28% better multi-core performance over Intel Core Ultra 7 155H at 45W power envelope (although Ryzen did better in this test compared to Intel). On the graphics front, the Snapdragon is claimed to match the performance of the Intel chip at half the power (20W). It also claims to be faster than Apple’s M3 SoC – albeit that chip only comes with 4+4 cores.
Qualcomm says laptops powered by new Snapdragon chips should arrive starting mid-2024, and we’ve seen one model from Lenovo recently surfaced set to use the new silicon.
Pokdepinion: There’s a bit of vagueness from the specs that I’m not exactly a fan of.
