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American semiconductor company Qualcomm unveiled a new addition to its Snapdragon X family for PCs – the Snapdragon X Plus. This chip is a more affordable version of the recently introduced high-end Snapdragon X Elite. Laptops featuring both these processors are anticipated to be available in the coming months.
The Snapdragon X Plus boasts a 10-core Oryon CPU, a custom-designed processor that Qualcomm claims delivers up to 37 per cent faster CPU performance and up to 54 per cent lower power consumption compared to similar products. Similar to the top-of-the-range Snapdragon X Elite platform, this chip incorporates a dedicated Qualcomm Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for on-device artificial intelligence capabilities.
According to Qualcomm, the NPU on the Snapdragon X Plus can perform 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS), making it the world’s fastest NPU for laptops according to the company.
In a statement, Kedar Kondap, Senior Vice President of Compute and Gaming, Qualcomm, said, “Snapdragon X Series platforms provide leading experiences and are positioned to revolutionise the PC industry. Snapdragon X Plus will power AI-powered PCs, enabling more users to excel as innovative new AI experiences emerge in this period of rapid development and deployment. By delivering leading CPU performance, AI capabilities and power efficiency, we are once again pushing the boundaries of what is possible in mobile computing.”
Additionally, to showcase the NPU’s performance, Qualcomm presented a selection of AI-powered applications for PCs built on the Hexagon NPU. The company demonstrated code generation in “Visual Studio Code” using Codegen, a program designed to assist developers by generating new lines of code in real-time with on-device generative AI. Other features showcased by the company to illustrate the chip’s capabilities included music generation based on text prompts in Audacity and automatic language translation into live captions in OBS Studio.
Qualcomm anticipates that PCs powered by the Snapdragon X Plus and Snapdragon X Elite chipsets will be available in mid-2024. However, the company did not disclose any specific brands that are currently developing devices powered by the new Snapdragon X-series chips.
