The well-known American chip maker Qualcomm has just announced the launch of its new platform Snapdragon X Plus for laptops, a solution that is positioned slightly below the Snapdragon X Elite model. The new chipset is equipped with a 10-core Oryon processor with a maximum frequency of 3.4 GHz and supports up to 64GB of RAM with a bandwidth of 135 GB/s.
Qualcomm announces the Snapdragon X Plus: will it be the best chip for laptops?
Despite being a smaller version than the Elite, the Snapdragon X Plus stands out for the presence of a 45 TOPS NPU, which Qualcomm proclaims as the fastest laptop NPU in the world. This component is designed to deliver exceptional performance, long battery life and cutting-edge AI capabilities right on your device.
During the presentation, Qualcomm demonstrated the potential of the new chip through various applications: the Real-time code generation in Visual Studio Code using Codegen, creating music in Audacity using Riffusion AI to generate new music tracks from pre-existing prompts or songs, and implementing live subtitles in OBS Studio, which allows the automatic translation of 100 spoken languages into live subtitles in as many languages, using Whisper AI in real time during streaming broadcasts.
Laptops that will integrate the Snapdragon X Plus chip (along with the X Elite model) they should be available on the market from the middle of this year, produced by the main OEMs globally.
Il Oryon processor included in the Snapdragon X Plus promises a 37% higher performance than that of some unspecified competitors, with up to 54% lower energy consumption. The chip supports LPDDR5x memory, it has a total of 42MB of cache and is made with a 4nm production process. The Snapdragon X Plus supports up to 3 external displays with 4K HDR resolution (with a maximum of 60 Hz), and includes the Wi-Fi 7 support, Bluetooth 5.4, an advanced camera ISP and “immersive lossless” audio.
Will all this be enough to make Qualcomm the leader in the laptop processor sector? We'll find out in the following months!
