Qualcomm today announced its new Snapdragon X Elite platform at the Snapdragon Summit 2023 in Maui, Hawaii, USA. The company Snapdragon has announced that the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite platform features the company’s Orion CPU and promises up to two times the performance boost over its closest competitors. So far, Qualcomm has only shared some reference designs and benchmarks, but we expect to see some live benchmarks in the coming days.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite chip is built on a 4nm process, with 12 high-performance cores clocked at up to 3.8GHz and 136GB/s of memory bandwidth. The chipmaker showed off some impressive numbers during the keynote, including 50 percent “faster peak multi-threaded performance” compared to the Apple Silicon M2 and twice the CPU performance compared to the Intel Core i7-13800H. However, it’s worth mentioning here that the Snapdragon X Elite has 50 percent more cores than Apple’s M2 chip.
Oryon, Qualcomm’s latest ARM CPU core, was designed by Nuvia, the company it acquired in 2021. The Snapdragon X Elite SoC is packed with 12 Orion cores. They are divided into three parts with four cores. The Snapdragon X Elite seems like a huge leap in improvement considering the company’s older 8XC chips. For a laptop, the Snapdragon X Elite SoC looks like a powerful chip, but we’ll have to wait for full hands-on and live benchmarks.
On the graphics front, Qualcomm claims its latest chipset offers twice the performance of the Intel Core i7-13800H with 74 percent lower power consumption.
Qualcomm is keenly focused on adding an AI element to its latest chips. The Snapdragon X Elite device itself is capable of running generative AI models with over 13 billion parameters. The company’s latest premium mobile chipset, Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, is also packed with on-device generative AI features.
In the Day 1 keynote, Qualcomm announced several key partners, including Lenovo, that are on board to ship devices packed with its latest chips. You can expect PCs powered by Snapdragon X Elite to start shipping from mid-2024.
Qualcomm Wireless announced
Another interesting announcement during the keynote was Qualcomm Seamless. Dubbed as a ‘cross-platform’ technology that enables devices across multiple platforms to talk to each other so that users can have a seamless experience, it will work across unlimited Android, Windows and Snapdragon-based devices. Qualcomm is working with Microsoft, Google, Dell, Lenovo and other partners to bring its seamless technology to more devices. Use cases can revolve around switching wireless earphones between multiple sources, moving files between different devices, etc.
Snapdragon Seamless comes built-in on the company’s new Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 platforms. Qualcomm partners like Xiaomi, Lenovo, Microsoft, and others are expected to start supporting the technology in their upcoming products.