Snapdragon X Plus is Here to Take on Apple’s M-Series Chips

Apr. 24, 2024

Qualcomm has finally announced the Snapdragon X Plus chipset for PCs. We had earlierreportedthat Qualcomm is working on a Snapdragon X series chipset with 10 Oryon CPU cores and that is the Snapdragon X Plus. It’s the toned-down version of Snapdragon X Elite with some performance downgrades in CPU and GPU.

The Snapdragon X Plus hasonly one variant (X1P-64-100)which offers a maximum multithreaded frequency up to 3.4GHz. There is no dual-core boost in the SD X Plus variant. Its Adreno GPU can perform up to 3.8 TFLOPS and supports LPDDR5X memory as well. The chipset is developed on TSMC’s 4nm process node.

While the CPU and GPU are slightly downgraded, the HexagonNPU remains the sameacross Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus processors. The NPU can perform 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS) which is impressive.

Qualcomm says the Hexagon NPU is powerful enough to run AI models locally and generate outputs at30 tokens per second. In addition to that, its NPU can generate code from Codegen, generate fresh music in Audacity using the Riffusion model locally, and translate live captions in OBS Studio in 100 languages.

According to Qualcomm, the Snapdragon X Plus, although it’s slightly less powerful than the premium-tier Snapdragon X Elite, delivers 37% faster CPU performance than the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H. Not just that, itdraws 54% less powerwhile matching the peak performance of the x86 processor.

All in all, there are a total of four Snapdragon X series variants, of which the Snapdragon X Plus has 10 CPU cores and the frequency is clocked up to 3.4GHz. In the Geekbench 6.2 test, its CPU scores around2400 in the single-core test, and around 13,000 in the multi-core test.

In my opinion, Qualcomm has carved out the Snapdragon X Plus processor for a budget offering. However, its performancerivals the Apple M2 Proand base Apple M3 which is no mean feat.

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