Promising “the PC Reborn”, Qualcomm has taken the Snapdragon X Elite chip, which it launched during its annual conference in Hawaii late in 2023, and delivered the Snapdragon X Plus, which offers 45 TOPS – a measure of the power of the AI capabilities within the chip – delivering power, and long battery life, too!
If you’ve seen Apple’s M1, M2 and M3 chips for its laptops and desktop computers, you would know these chips are much more powerful versions of the chips that it uses in its iPhones.
Specially Apple designed, these chips freed Apple from Intel’s computing architecture, allowing much more power than Intel’s chips could deliver, in thin and light designs that offer very long battery life, and are even compatible with iPhone and iPad apps.
Although Qualcomm, which makes most of the chips that are used in smartphones running Android, did have a version of its smartphone chips originally called the Qualcomm 8cx, and there were Windows PCs running on these platforms, those chips just weren’t as powerful as Intel’s chips, and weren’t as powerful as Apple’s M-series chips.
Well, a company called Nuvia, which had former Apple employees founding it, ex-employees that worked on developing Apple’s processors, was purchased by Qualcomm a couple of years ago, and now Qualcomm has its Snapdragon X series chips, which are able to deliver the same kind of powerful benefits and long lasting battery that Apple’s M-Series chips are famous for, and finally, the PC world can have laptops that can run without cooling fans, which can have Qualcomm’s 5g modems built in, can have long battery life, and more.
The Snapdragon X Plus (more info here) is a slightly cut down version of the Snapdragon X Elite, and Qualcomm has published a video at YouTube, which I’ve embedded below. We’re very likely to see a Microsoft Surface device with Snapdragon X chips sometime in May, and similar devices from HP, Lenovo and others this year.
As Qualcomm states, the X Plus is “equipped with cutting-edge technologies to deliver powerful performance, long battery life, lightning-fast wireless connectivity, and exciting new AI features powered by The World’s Fastest NPU for Laptops deliver 45 TOPS!”
So it also enables an “AI PC” experience, and you’ll definitely be seeing a lot of activity around laptops with these chips, which will compete strongly with PCs equipped with Intel and AMD processors, too.
Here’s the video where you can learn more!
