Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon X Plus desktop processor for laptops running Windows on ARM. This chip will be cheaper than the flagship Snapdragon X Elite, but it will still offer good performance for everyday tasks, games and AI-powered features. Snapdragon X Plus will be used in mid-range devices.
The Hexagon NPU (neural processing unit) integrated into the chip provides an amazing performance of 45 TOPs (Tera Operations / Second). In comparison, the NPU in the Intel Core Ultra reaches 10 TOPs, while the AMD Ryzen 8040 hits 16 TOPs.
Microsoft notes that a minimum of 40 TOPs in NPU performance was necessary for Copilot offline tasks, making the Qualcomm chip a perfect fit.
The Snapdragon X Plus is capable of supporting up to 64 GB of LPDDR5x RAM, operating at a data transfer rate of 8,448 MT/s and providing a bandwidth of 135 GB/s. Additionally, the device offers support for M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD drives.
In addition, the ability to connect up to three monitors with a resolution of 4K and a frequency of 60 Hz is stated, hardware encoding and decoding of the AV1 codec for 4K HDR video is supported, and “enterprise-level security” is implemented. Snapdragon X Plus includes a Snapdragon X65 modem for 5G connectivity. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 LE are also supported.
Qualcomm says the Snapdragon X Plus is 10% faster than the Apple M3 processor in the Geekbench 6.2 multi-threaded test, despite having fewer cores and a lower clock speed. This processor, of course, will not be able to compete with the Apple M3 Pro and M3 Max.
Here are some tech specs.
Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus are expected to hit the market at the same time. It is possible that OEMs will present their devices based on new chips running Windows on ARM as early as June 4 as part of the COMPUTEX 2024 event.
Source: Windows Central via thecommunity.
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