The company unveiled its latest innovation: the Snapdragon X Plus, an Arm processor that boasts superior performance and presents a challenge to established market leaders.
With the addition of the X Plus to their new processor family, alongside the X Elite, Qualcomm is making significant strides in the technological race, offering two chips that compete head-to-head with industry giants.
Snapdragon X Plus: A potential giant that challenges everyone
The Snapdragon X Plus emerges as a robust and efficient competitor in the processor market. Built on a 4nm architecture, this 10-core processor boasts impressive features, including a 42MB cache and a 45 TOPS NPU, far surpassing the Apple M3. It offers powerful performance and has an Oryon CPU, Adreno GPU, and Hexagon NPU.
Compared to its predecessor, the X Elite, the X Plus has 10 cores operating at a speed of 3.4GHz, lacking the dual-core boost of its 12 cores. However, despite these differences, it has proven to be 10% faster than Apple’s M3, according to Geekbench v6.2. Furthermore, it offers exceptional energy efficiency, consuming up to 54% less than Intel and AMD chips.
If these benchmarks hold, we’re looking at an excellent processor that outperforms the Apple M3 and comes close to the Snapdragon. Compared to Intel and AMD, the difference is even more pronounced. The Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and the AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS require twice as much energy to match the performance of this processor.
What does this mean?
It means we can expect laptops with impressive battery life without compromising on performance, putting x86 architecture processors in a challenging position in the competition.
While the test results look promising, the new processors still need to undergo the ultimate test: real-world performance. In this arena, success will depend on Qualcomm’s chip, PC manufacturers, and Microsoft.
They need to ensure that the operating system fully utilizes the capabilities of these new CPUs. Fortunately, efforts are underway, with Windows 11 24H2 optimizing performance for these processors.
