The full Snapdragon X CPU line-up has now been unveiled, and according to Qualcomm's numbers it should put the fear of ARM into AMD and Intel's laptop divisions
Qualcomm has just taken the wraps off its new Snapdragon X range of laptop PC chips, giving us the full details of its first flush of ARM-based CPUs and a new lower-end model, too. The NEW Snapdragon X Plus processors will sit alongside the higher-spec X Elite chips, bringing the ARM architecture to the traditionally x86 dominated Windows desktop.
And, honestly, the new Qualcomm chips are the single piece of PC technology I'm most excited about seeing this year. With the promise that standard Windows games will «just work» with the Snapdragon X series, and the expectation that we are looking at performance levels around the already impressive AMD RDNA 3-based Radeon 780M built into the best of the red team's laptop chips and the best handheld gaming PCs around, there's some real promise in moving away from that classic x86 CPU in your next laptop.
Qualcomm has even said its chips can happily operate with discrete graphics cards, too, which means that gaming laptops based on the Snapdragon X Elite or X Plus chips aren't an impossibility, either.
Most of the specs of the new ARM chips have already been announced, but today we've got the full suite of processors, along with a decoder to help us understand the different part numbers. Gotta love a decoder…
Personally, I feel like if you need a decoder to understand a part's platform then you're doing naming schemes wrong. But at least there are only four different chips to get to grips with right now, and the decoder is nowhere near as convoluted and counterintuitive as AMD's laptop decoding wheel.
There are three X Elite chips and a single one of the only just announced X Plus processors. The X Elite chips are all 12-core parts, while the X Plus is a 10-core CPU. Other than that it's mostly a clock speed difference and a lack of Dual Core Boost that separates the X Plus chip. Though in those terms it actually matches the lowest spec X Elite, so potentially more affordable Snapdragon X series laptops will still have a
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