A new member of the Snapdragon X series of chips for PCs has been announced by American semiconductor company Qualcomm. The chip, dubbed the Snapdragon X Plus, is a scaled-down variant of the company’s flagship Snapdragon X Elite. It is anticipated that PCs running on these two CPUs will be released in the upcoming months.
Chip Specifications
The chip has a 10-core Oryon CPU, a specially integrated CPU that, according to the manufacturer, offers up to 54% less power usage and up to 37% quicker CPU performance than peers.
The chip features a specialized Qualcomm Neural Processing Unit (NPU) enabling on-device artificial intelligence capabilities, just like the high-end Snapdragon X Elite platform. According to Qualcomm, the Snapdragon X Plus’s NPU can perform 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS). Qualcomm claims that its Hexagon NPU is the fastest NPU available for laptops worldwide.
The platforms in the Snapdragon X Series offer cutting-edge experiences and are poised to completely transform the PC market. According to Qualcomm senior vice president Kedar Kondap,
“S Snapdragon X Plus will power AI-Supercharged PCs that enable even more users to excel as radical new AI experiences emerge in this period of rapid development and deployment.”
“We are once again pushing the boundaries of what is possible in mobile computing with our cutting-edge CPU performance, AI capabilities, and power efficiency.”
Qualcomm demonstrated the NPU performance of the chip by previewing a few AI-enabled PC apps built on the Hexagon NPU. The business used Codegen, a tool for on-device generative AI, to demonstrate code creation in “Visual Studio Code.” Codegen is meant to help developers by producing new lines of code in real time. The company also showcased two more functions to show off the capabilities of the chip: Audacity’s ability to generate music based on text prompts and OBS Studio’s ability to translate any language into real-time captions.
According to Qualcomm, mid-2024 is when the PCs running the Snapdragon X Plus and Snapdragon X Elite chipsets are anticipated to go on sale. The business did not, however, name any brands that are developing hardware using the new Snapdragon X-series CPUs.
