2 months ago
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Qualcomm is still going strong with its bet on its AI-first processors powering up Windows PCs. At IFA in Berlin, the company unveiled a new, more cost-efficient version of the Snapdragon X Plus. Soon, you’ll find plenty of AI-first Copilot+ laptops for less than $1,000.
The Oryon CPU-based Snapdragon X Plus is an 8-core chip, compared to the 10-core Snapdragon X Plus announced in April. In its press release, Qualcomm boasts that the laptop processor is so power efficient that batteries last longer for the machines it’s powering. Qualcomm mentions up to multiple days of battery on a single charge in the chip brief. However, Microsoft’s Pavan Davuluri, a VP at Microsoft, is more specific in the press release about “all-day battery life.” The NPU on board is rated at 45 TOPS, or trillions of operations per second, slightly more than the baseline operating standard for running Co-Pilot+. The Snapdragon X Plus 8-core supports chip-to-cloud security, WiFi 7, UFS 4.0, and up to 64GB of memory. Its integrated GPU can handle up to three external monitors at a time.
Qualcomm’s lofty claims about the Snapdragon X Plus is that its 8-core Oryon CPU performs over 60% faster than Intel’s last-gen Core Ultra 7, a 16-core AI-first chip, with almost 180% more efficiency. The proof is in the pudding, or the benchmark numbers and anecdotal evidence, as it were. The first laptops with the chip will soon be available from well-known manufacturers like Asus, Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung, to name a few.
The PC industry has been all-in on AI PCs since Co-Pilot+ launched in May. This latest 8-core release from Qualcomm seems particularly tuned to help sell cheaper laptops. And the more these laptops make up the market share, the better the industry’s justification for making way for AI-first PCs. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X relies on the NPU to do the bulk of the AI work, though it still has an integrated GPU. The apps that work best on it are specifically optimized for this architecture. And if they can get more people to buy an affordable computer based on an AI-first chip, it will be easier for the industry to justify its existence.
