There are announcements like this one for the Snapdragon X Plus SoC that, while expected for some time, are just as relevant. well They mark the starting signal for the changes that can come from their hands.. In this case, moreover, we are not talking about advances based on leaks, but on official communications from Qualcomm, which already told us in October 2022 that 2024 will be a key year for a formula that has so far been shown to be far below its potential. I’m talking, of course, about the sum of Windows and ARM.

It was originally identified as Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 and as Nuvia 1 Gen. it was in October last year when we knew that the name of these integrated devices would be Snapdragonand soon a few leaks started happening, most of which have been confirmed now with the introduction of the Snapdragon X Plus. A curious move, yes, since there hasn’t been a similar move for the three Elite SoCs yet, i.e. the launch, although the specifications of four have been released (the three Elites and the Plus introduced today).

Snapdragon X Elite

Snapdragon X Plus

So now we will focus on what they presented to us today, the Snapdragon 10-core Oryon processor capable of reaching 3.4 GHz, and it does so in an extremely efficient way, as according to Qualcomm, it is up to 37% faster than its competitors, while its power consumption is reduced by up to 54%. In the graphics section, we find the Adreno GPU with a computing capacity of up to 3.8 TFLOPS

One of the elements for which Qualcomm shows more chest, its Hexagon 1.5 NPU, which we’ve been told can reach 45 MIPS, which makes it a platform engine that will be fully suitable for what is expected from the next generation of IA PCs, which, remember, was set at an NPU computing capacity of at least 40 TOPS. So we are waiting to see what AMD and Microsoft will show us in the fall and, relatedly, Apple with its M4, at the moment we are facing the fastest NPU integrated into a notebook SoC.

It is therefore not surprising that Qualcomm made the decision Showcase the performance of the Snapdragon X Plus with three artificial intelligence-based task tests which were performed on the device itself, functions for which it is common to resort to online services nowadays. In particular, three uses have been outlined, undoubtedly very diverse, and which demonstrate the potential that IA PC has in many areas:

• Code generation in Visual Studio powered by Codegen.
• Music generation in Audacity using Riffusion AI.
• Caption generation live in OBS Studio, provide automatic translation in 100 languages, based on Whisper (OpenAI).

This is exactly what many users expect, clearer examples of what AI running on the client can offer us, a field in which some solutions, for example from Adobe, have been around for a long time, but are generally unknown, or at least very widespread, to ordinary mortals. And this will play a key role in the PC industry, because this whole wave of new features could be the stimulus that this market has been waiting for.

But back to Snapdragon up to 64 gigabytes of LPDDR5 RAMAs well as NVMe PCIe 4.0 storage and UFS 4. Its electronics are capable of providing up to three simultaneous UHD outputs at 60 Hz and offer AV1 encoding and decoding support in video streams up to 4K HDR. In terms of connectivity, we can also expect the latest of the latest, more specifically Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, in addition to 5G for manufacturers who want to provide mobile connectivity to notebooks based on this SoC.

Qualcomm also indicated that the first systems with Snapdragon At this point and waiting for its behavior in the real world, it seems that Qualcomm has already fulfilled the hardware part, so now Microsoft has to step in in this way to offer users Windows 11 on ARM, which is less enviable (in a good way, you know what I mean) than the one offered to users of its operating system in the x86-64 environment.

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