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Laptops with the Snapdragon X Elite chip will be available…
Qualcomm unveiled its ambitious plan with Snapdragon X Elite chips last October. They have already conquered the chip market for mobile devices, and now they are flirting with the market for desktop and laptop computers, where a much harder nut to crack awaits them (AMD, Intel, Apple).
In October, we wondered when the new chips would hit the market, or when we would be able to see the first devices with Snapdragon X Elite chips. Unexpectedly, we now have an answer, and in addition, another juicy piece of news that Microsoft may not have wanted to reveal yet.
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon confirmed during a recent meeting that Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptops will launch “mid-2024.” More interestingly, Amon also said that the proposed launch will coincide with “the next version of Windows,” which could be a big hint at the tentative release date for Windows 12.
Qualcomm has called the Snapdragon X Elite “the most powerful, intelligent, and efficient processor in its class for Windows.” Is this a reason for AMD and Intel to be nervous? Not yet, as these are just statements from a developer who understandably needs to hype the arrival of their processors. There are reasonable doubts that Qualcomm could take the throne of the chip giants of the last three decades with the first generation.
Of course, the announcement of this chip came before there was any official word on Apple's MacBook Pro M3 and Intel's Core Ultra chips late last year, so Qualcomm could only confirm that their processors are more powerful than Intel's 13th generation and M2. The company also recently claimed that their 21 % chip is faster than Apple's M3 silicon, which is a very optimistic prediction, and we can't wait to see if this is just empty words or reality.
Not only that, Qualcomm has also added an AI engine to the X Elite that can handle 75 TOPS (trillion operations per second) – that’s a lot more than the roughly 34 TOPS that the Intel Core 7 165H chip can handle.
Let's go back to the news about the release of a new version of Windows, which will naturally focus on artificial intelligence. It might not even be called Windows 12, but just a refresh of the existing Windows 11. And when is that tentative release date? All signs point to June 2024.
