(Credit: Qualcomm)
Expect price drops on laptops running Qualcomm chips. At the IFA trade show in Berlin today, Qualcomm debuted the Snapdragon X Plus 8 core, two laptop processors that expand on the company’s foray into PCs.
When Qualcomm launched the Snapdragon X series in June, it only released one X Plus chip, the 10-core X1P-64-100. The rest were more powerful 12-core processors in the higher-end X Elite family.
The company is now targeting the lower end by releasing two 8-core processors in the X Plus series, specifically the X1P-46-100 and X1P-42-100. That could lead to more Snapdragon-powered laptops, starting at $799, when many of the products cost $999 and up.
(Credit: Qualcomm)
(Credit: Qualcomm)As a result, Qualcomm is marketing the new chips as the "leading CPU for mainstream PCs." Despite reducing the core count, the Snapdragon X Plus 8 core will still offer "multiday battery life," and significantly better performance and features over rival chips from Intel, AMD, and Apple, according to Qualcomm.
In particular, the X1P-46-100 can hit a 4.0GHz boost clock speed, up from its normal clock speed of 3.4GHz. Users can also expect the X Plus chips and their built-in neural processing units to perform at the same level for AI workloads as the X Elite family.
Qualcomm supplied some benchmarks that show the X Plus 8-core chips easily beating a competing Intel "Meteor Lake" Core Ultra processor and AMD Ryzen 8000 mobile chips in both performance and power efficiency, sometimes by double or even triple digits. That said, there's reason to be skeptical since our previous reviews of Qualcomm's Snapdragon Elite X chips show the processors often trading blows with rival Intel and AMD chips on CPU speeds.
(Credit: Qualcomm)
(Credit: Qualcomm)Along with the two eight-core chips, Qualcomm is also introducing a slightly upgraded 10-core processor in the X1P-66-100. It features the same clock speeds and cache as the X1P-64-100. The key difference is that Qualcomm is giving the new chip a boost clock frequency of 4GHz over a single core for those times your laptop needs a short burst of faster performance.
Stay tuned for our reviews when we can put the new Qualcomm chips to the test, especially since Intel and AMD are releasing their own next-generation processors for laptops. In the meantime, consumers can expect the X Plus processors to arrive in laptops from vendors including Acer, HP, and Lenovo, among others.