First Tests! The Snapdragon X Elite 'Oryon' Chip Is Ready to Be a Star in 2024 Laptops

pcmag.com:

MAUI, Hawaii—Let's start with a great big caveat: This is not your conventional benchmark testing story, at least as PCMag usually does them. We attended Qualcomm's 2023 Snapdragon Summit last week, and were regaled with session after session detailing advances in on-device AI, Qualcomm's ubiquitous Snapdragon smartphone chips, news around new cross-device info sharing and synchronicity. But most of all there is "Oryon": the company’s next-generation CPU core silicon that will scale from laptops (where it will make its first appearance in the company’s Snapdragon X Elite processor next year) eventually to smartphones, automotive applications, and more.

If you haven't heard about Snapdragon X Elite and Oryon yet, you might want to check out our deeper dive on the fundamentals of the new Snapdragon X line, which is powered by that new CPU core. Laptops based on this silicon are expected in mid-2024, according to Qualcomm, and the company already has more laptop vendors onboard as hardware partners than with any other generation of Snapdragon compute silicon to date. The partner list will include Acer, Asus, Dell, Honor, HP, Lenovo, and Microsoft: pretty much a who's who of the major PC OEMs.

First, let's talk a little about the basics of Snapdragon X Elite, and run through Qualcomm's testing scenario as it was presented to us, and how we'll assess it. The testing regimen we saw was “hands-off”: a ballroom full of reference-design laptops containing the Snapdragon X Elite, all looking identical but configured in two representative system power levels.

Snapdragon X Elite is the first iteration of Qualcomm's next-generation compute system-on-a-chip (SoC), slated to succeed the Snapdragon 8cx, 8cx Gen 2, and 8cx Gen 3. The 8cx