The new Snapdragon X Elite for Windows laptops

The all-new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile chip will power all the most powerful phones and tablets on the market next year. At the same time, Qualcomm introduced another chip designed for Windows laptops on the ARM platform. It's called the Snapdragon X Elite, and with it, Qualcomm declared war on the giants AMD and Intel. Qualcomm hopes to take a bigger share of the PC market with its latest chip.

Built on a 4nm (nanometer) manufacturing process, the Snapdragon X Elite features 12 high-performance Oryon cores clocked at 3.8GHz with a single and double boost up to 4.3GHz. Qualcomm states that its new processor achieves equivalent multi-threading performance to competing 13th generation Intel CPUs while consuming 68 percent less power, which is a very optimistic prediction. A comparison has also been made to the Apple M2 ARM chip, with Qualcomm claiming a 50 percent faster maximum multithreading performance for the Snapdragon X Elite. These are big promises and we will have to wait for real independent tests to verify these claims.

On the graphics side, the X Elite has a built-in Adreno GPU with a capacity of 4.6 TFLOPs and support for DirectX 12 API. The chip can handle up to three external UHD monitors at 60 Hz. Video editors can take advantage of the Adreno Video Processing Unit (VPU), which supports 4K60 10-bit encoding and decoding for H.264, HEVC (H.265) and AV1 files.

Qualcomm also added a Hexagon NPU chip with 45 tera operations per second (TOPs), which is great for generative AI tasks.

The chip supports LPDDR5x RAM with up to 136 GB/s of memory bandwidth and a total of 42 MB of cache, as well as PCIe Gen4 or UFS 4.0 storage. In terms of connectivity, the Snapdragon X Elite has a FastConnect 7800 system with support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, and a Snapdragon X65 5G modem for cellular connectivity with up to 10 Gbps of premium transfer speeds. Thanks to the Qualcomm Aqstic DAC, the X Elite supports lossless audio playback and also includes a Qualcomm Spectra image processing processor (ISP) with support for dual cameras with resolutions up to 36 MP and 4K HDR video recording.