Qualcomm says new Snapdragon X Plus chip is faster than Apple’s M3

Although Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite has yet to appear in retail devices, the company announced a new Snapdragon chip for laptops.

The Snapdragon X Plus is a 4nm ARM-based chip using the Oryon CPU architecture, just like the X Elite. However, Qualcomm intends the X Plus for more affordable devices, so the specs fall a little behind the X Elite. According to Engadget, which tried out gadgets sporting the X Plus, the chip has 10 cores (two fewer than the X Elite) and a 3.4GHz clock speed (down from 3.8GHz on the X Elite).

However, the X Plus sports the same Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU) as the X Elite, meaning it boasts 45 TOPS of machine learning performance. Notably, we learned recently that Microsoft requires laptops to offer at least 40 TOPS to run elements of its Copilot AI on-device.

Additionally, Qualcomm told Engadget that the X Plus boasts significant power efficiency compared to other PC chips. According to the company, the X Plus delivers 37 percent faster CPU performance than Intel’s Core Ultra 7 155H when both chips run at the same wattage. Qualcomm also claimed the X Plus is 10 percent faster than Apple’s M3 chip in multi-threaded CPU tasks.

Engadget was also able to run benchmarks, noting the X Plus scored 12,905 in the Geekbench multi-core test and 852 in the Cinebench 2024 multi-thread test.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chips continue to seem promising, but we’re still a long way off from seeing them in retail devices. The X Elite was announced in 2023 and hasn’t turned up in laptops yet, while the X Plus won’t show up until the second half of 2024.

Plus, there are still unknowns about how well Windows will work on the chips. Microsoft hasn’t had the smoothest transition to ARM, though things might be looking up.

Still, if the chips are as good as Qualcomm says, Windows on ARM might soon offer some competition to Apple.

Source: Engadget