Apple’s migration to its own ARM-based silicon for Macs from x86 Intel chips has been a wild success. Apple managed to make chips that perform even better than the Intel chips the company was putting on its older MacBooks. But the PC world has largely stuck to x86, with a few sporadic ARM laptops here and there. Qualcomm wants to solve this once and for all and has now released the Snapdragon X Elite chip — which the company is pitching as an Apple Silicon killer.
If anyone can stand up to Apple in desktop ARM chips, it might be Qualcomm, since it makes the SoCs for most Android smartphones out there. We learned a few days ago that Qualcomm was rebranding its Snapdragon 8cx line of ARM chips into “Snapdragon X,” hinting at a huge leap coming soon, and now, we have the first chip belonging to this new Snapdragon X range. The company is confident enough to call it the “most powerful, intelligent, and efficient processor ever created for Windows in its class.”
Let’s start with the specs. The processor has Qualcomm’s new Oryon cores, twelve of them to be exact, which are clocked at up to 3.8 GHz and can boost up to 4.3 GHz. The company is making some wild claims about this new Oryon CPU, saying that it’s able to beat both the Intel Core i9-13980HX, Intel’s best laptop chip to date, and even Apple’s M2 Max. Not only that, but Qualcomm also says that the CPU is able to match the performance of the M2 Max while also consuming 30% less power.
If all of that is true (we’re still waiting on independent testing), then Apple is up for some serious competition in a segment where the company was basically running solo. Then again, it should be noted here that both NVIDIA and AMD are reportedly in the race to release ARM CPUs for PCs too, which would compete with Apple and Qualcomm. With a possible four-way battle on the horizon, you could say that the only real loser here is Intel.
Other details for the Snapdragon X Elite SoC include an Adreno GPU capable of 4.6 TFLOPs and compatible with DirectX 12, a 4nm process, and support for up to 64GB of LPDDR5X RAM. We also have the Snapdragon X65 5G modem, highlighting one of the key advantages of Qualcomm’s hardware over Apple’s desktop chips — they support cellular connectivity and allow for a laptop to connect anywhere. There’s also support for Wi-Fi 7 and PCI Express Gen 4.
The Snapdragon X Elite will show up in the best ARM Windows laptops next year, so you should keep an eye out for announcements from hardware makers.
Source: Qualcomm
