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Qualcomm today announced its new Snapdragon X Elite platform at Snapdragon Summit 2023 in Maui, Hawaii, United States. The company announced the Snapdragon X brand earlier this month. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite platform features the company's Oryon CPU and promises twice the performance of its closest competitors. So far, Qualcomm has only shared a few reference designs and benchmarks, but we expect some live benchmarks in the coming days.
Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite chip is built on a 4nm process, with 12 high-quality cores, a frequency of 3.8 GHz and a memory bandwidth of up to 136 GB/s. The chipmaker showed some impressive numbers during the conference, including 50 percent “faster peak multi-threading performance” compared to the Apple Silicon M2 and twice the CPU performance compared to the Intel Core i7-13800H. However, it should be noted here that the Snapdragon X Elite has 50 percent more cores compared to Apple's M2 chip.
Oryon, Qualcomm's latest Arm CPU core, is designed by Nuvia, a company it acquired back in 2021. The Snapdragon X Elite SoC packs 12 Oryon cores. They are divided into three parts, each with four cores. The Snapdragon X Elite looks like a massive leap of improvement over 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.
In terms of graphics, Qualcomm claims its latest chipset offers twice the performance of the Intel Core i7-13800H with 74 percent less power consumption.
Qualcomm remains deeply focused on adding an AI element to its latest chips. The Snapdragon X Elite can run generative AI models with over 13 billion parameters on the device itself. The company's latest premium mobile chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, also features on-device generative AI features.
During the first day of the conference, Qualcomm announced several key partners, including Lenovo, who are on board to ship devices packed with its latest chips. You can expect Snapdragon X Elite-equipped PCs to start shipping from mid-2024.
announced Qualcomm Seamless
Another interesting announcement during the conference was Qualcomm Seamless. Dubbed a “cross-platform” technology that can allow devices on multiple platforms to talk to each other so users have a seamless experience, Seamless will work on 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 be switching wireless headphones between multiple sources, transferring files between different devices, etc.
Snapdragon Seamless is built into the company's new Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 platforms. Qualcomm's partners such as Xiaomi, Lenovo, Microsoft and others are expected to use the support of the technology in their future products.
