Qualcomm Looks to Take on Apple, Intel With Its Snapdragon X Elite Processor

Qualcomm today announced its new Snapdragon X Elite platform at its Snapdragon Summit 2023 in Maui, Hawaii, United States. The company had announced the Snapdragon X branding earlier this month. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite platform features the company's Oryon CPU and promises a performance boost of up to two times versus its closest competitors. So far, Qualcomm has only shared some reference designs and benchmarks, but we're expecting to see some live benchmarks over the coming days.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite chip is built on a 4nm process, with 12 high-performance cores clocked at 3.8GHz and up to 136GB/s memory bandwidth. The chipmaker showed off some impressive numbers during the keynote, including 50 percent "faster peak multi-threaded performance" when compared to Apple Silicon M2, and up to twice the CPU performance compared to Intel Core i7-13800H. However, it's worth mentioning 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, the company that it acquired back in 2021. Snapdragon X Elite SoC is packed with 12 Oryon cores. These are split into three parts with four cores each. Snapdragon X Elite seems like a massive jump in improvement considering the company's older 8XC chips. For a laptop, Snapdragon X Elite SoC looks like a powerful chip, but we'll have to wait for a complete hands-on and live benchmarks. 

On the graphics front, Qualcomm claims its latest chipset offers up to twice the performance compared to an Intel Core i7-13800H with 74 percent less power consumption. 

Qualcomm remains deeply focussed on adding an AI element into its latest chips. The Snapdragon X Elite is capable of running generative AI models with more than 13 billion parameters on the device itself. The company's latest premium mobile chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, is also packed with on-device generative AI features. 

During 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 the middle of 2024. 

Qualcomm Seamless announced 

Another interesting announcement during the keynote was Qualcomm Seamless. Dubbed as a 'cross-platform' technology that can enable devices across multiple platforms to talk to each other so users can 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 could revolve around switching wireless earphones between multiple sources, moving files among different devices, and so on. 

Snapdragon Seamless comes built-in on the company's new Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 platforms. Qualcomm partners such as Xiaomi, Lenovo, Microsoft, and others are expected to roll out support for the technology in their upcoming products.