Meet Snapdragon X Elite: Qualcomm Touts Big AI, Compute Gains on Arm Laptop CPUs

pcmag.com:

MAUI, Hawaii—At the opening keynote of the 2023 Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm representatives broke out the speeds and feeds in force and detailed the first SoC in the company's Snapdragon X Elite line, powered by its much-anticipated next-gen CPU core, code-named "Oryon." Teased earlier in the month, “Snapdragon X” is the branding for Qualcomm’s newest SoCs for PC compute, and the Snapdragon Elite X is the first issue, positioned as its premium solution. Outfitted for AI local processing and packing a host of efficiency-minded innovations, the Snapdragon X Elite built on Oryon is, according to Qualcomm, the punchiest processor for laptops that it has ever produced.

Indeed, it’s the subject of a lot of impressive (you might even say, gaudy) claims around its conventional compute performance, its AI inferencing aptitude, and the overall power efficiency. Snapdragon claims that the Oryon chip will be scalable across a wide range of laptop form factors: thin ultraportables, flexible 2-in-1s, even large-screen power machines. So, how did Qualcomm get here?

Qualcomm, of course, is very well known for its chips and supporting components that go into modern smartphones. It's much less well known for its CPU efforts in PC laptops to date.

The broader "Snapdragon X" is the follow-on to the company’s Snapdragon 8cx, an Arm-based CPU line that appeared in a smattering of laptops over the last few years. The 8cx designs also showed up, in rebranded form, as the SQ1, SQ2, and SQ3 in a subset of Microsoft’s Surface Pro detachable 2-in-1s, most recently the Microsoft Surface Pro 9 (SQ3).

The 8cx has appeared in three generations: the original 8cx (2018), the 8cx Gen 2 (2020), and the 8cx Gen 3 (2021), and was Qualcomm’s first