After a few recent leaks, Qualcomm has officially unveiled the Snapdragon X Plus platform for laptops. This version is a notch below the Snapdragon X Elite. Instead of the 12-core CPU on the Snapdragon X Elite, the X Plus comes with 10 Cores of Oryon CPUs running at 3.4 GHz, and supports up to 64 GB of RAM with a bandwidth of 135 GB/s.
Speaking of Oryon CPUs, these new processors feature a 37% jump in performance while taking 54% less power than rival chips Qualcomm did not mention. The Snapdragon X Plus is built on a 4nm process, supports LPDDR5x RAM, and has a 45MB of total cache. It can run three different 4K displays at the same time, but capped to a 60Hz refresh rate. It has an advanced ISP for cameras, WiFi 7, and Bluetooth 5.4.
The Snapdragon X Plus stands out among rival chips thanks to its NPU, which is the fastest in the world according to Qualcomm. This is because it boasts a 45 TOPS NPU. Qualcomm says that the X Plus should provide “exceptional performance, long battery life, and industry-leading on-device AI capabilities.”
During Qualcomm’s presentation, they showcased various applications of on-device AI. This included code generation in Visual Studio Code through Codegen, which instantly creates new code using AI right on the device.
Additionally, they demonstrated music generation in Audacity using Riffusion, where on-device AI creates new music based on prompts or existing music. Lastly, they highlighted live captions in OBS Studio, where Whisper on-device AI translates spoken languages into live captions in real-time during live streams, supporting up to 100 languages.
Laptops featuring the Snapdragon X Plus should come out within a few months “from leading global OEMs”.
