Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite will deliver leading performance per watt to PCs

However, Qualcomm says that’s all about to change, thanks to the company’s new Snapdragon X Elite series of processors. Today at the Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii, the company unveiled some details and performance expectations for a new line of laptop processors based on its new Oryon CPU core technology.

When Qualcomm teased the Snapdragon X a few weeks ago, the company said the new Oryon architecture would revolutionize the way we use PCs. The company has said for some time that it thinks it can even beat Apple at its own Arm-based game. These are big words and a tall order, but let’s see what Qualcomm brings to the table here…

Snapdragon X Elite Secrets: Oryon CPU

We speculate that the Oryon CPU architecture is based on technology developed by Qualcomm’s acquisition of Nuvia more than 30 months ago. It takes time to design a chip, validate engineering samples, and ultimately bring a product to market, so the timing seems reasonable, but Qualcomm hasn’t stated this directly.What yes However, the Oryon CPU integrated into the Snapdragon X is said to offer “twice as much” CPU performance compared to its x86 rivals. We bet you didn’t see this coming, and neither did we.

The Oryon CPU is built on a 4nm process and has 12 high-performance cores running at 3.8 GHz. In cases where more performance for single- or multi-threaded workloads is required, a pair of cores can be boosted to 4.3GHz. All of Qualcomm’s diagrams describe the Oryon CPUs as three clusters of four CPU cores each, but we won’t read too much into that.The key point is that this does no It appears to be a big.LITTLE design, and all 12 cores looked relatively identical in Qualcomm’s early documentation. To confirm, all of these cores are single-threaded and do not support SMT (simultaneous multi-threading).

There’s also plenty of memory bandwidth available. The Snapdragon X Elite computing platform supports LPDDR5x memory running at 8533 MT/s for a total aggregate bandwidth of 136 GB per second. This bandwidth is funneled into the 42 MB of total cache on the Snapdragon X Elite SoC to ensure that all 12 cores can receive data and instructions.

Snapdragon X Elite: high-end performance and low power consumption

Qualcomm said that using the multi-threaded test of Geekbench 6.1 as a guide, Oryon CPU can achieve twice the performance of its competitors and require only 1/3 of the power consumption of competing CPUs. To make it easier to understand, here are the specific performance claims made by Qualcomm:

• Single-threaded performance beats Apple M2 Max and Intel Core i9-13980HX
• Reach M2 Max’s peak multi-threaded performance with 30% lower power consumption
• Reach Core i9-13980HX peak multi-threaded performance, reducing power consumption by 70%

These are pretty bold claims, but we also know that Geekbench 6 is sensitive to high memory bandwidth. Regardless, this performance is a far cry from the various Snapdragon 8cx systems we’ve tested. These older generation systems have never been able to match x86 performance in these tests, so Qualcomm has made considerable progress regardless.

The ones Qualcomm is comparing are the top of Intel and Apple’s laptop CPU lines, not mid-range CPUs like the Core i5 or M2 Pro. It’s probably no surprise that peak multi-threaded performance is reached in the lower power range compared to the M2 Max. Even the M2 Max in the current 16-inch MacBook Pro can only muster 8 performance cores, while the Oryon has 12, which is undoubtedly where much of this multi-threaded advantage comes from. Apple has largely stalled on single-threaded performance since the release of the 2020 Mac mini, so competition in the Arm64 space is certainly welcome, especially for Windows laptops. Intel has launched Meteor Lake in the laptop space, but it’s not here yet, so it’s hard to make any comparisons there.

Snapdragon X Elite built for artificial intelligence

Qualcomm has been promoting artificial intelligence as a transformative technology and hopes to bring the power of cloud machine learning to edge devices such as PCs. The Hexagon Neural Processing Unit (NPU) on the Snapdragon X Elite is supposed to offload machine learning tasks that would otherwise run on the CPU to dedicated accelerators for huge improvements. The company says Oryon delivers 45 TOPS of throughput and supports INT4 for greater efficiency, and thanks to its unified memory configuration, it can deliver greater AI-centric performance compared to most mobile SoCs. Workload pool.

Hexagon NPU can run machine learning models with over 13 billion parameters directly on the device. All told, Qualcomm claims the 45 TOPS figure is 4.5 times the performance of current CPUs in laptops and a 100x improvement over laptop CPUs launched since 2017. This is possible because of the nature of these low-precision workloads, which are typically used for AI inference.

Snapdragon X Elite Adreno Graphics Performance and Sensing Center

Qualcomm promises that the Snapdragon X Elite will offer more than just powerful CPU performance and powerful machine learning capabilities. In addition to this, the company also launched a new Adreno graphics processor and sensor hub. The Sensing Center is a collection of sensors, voice processing, always-aware image signal processors, and always-on connectivity that continuously feeds information to the AI ​​engine and host processor. The company believes this will change the way we use PCs and revolutionize the way these PCs interact with us.

Qualcomm’s Adreno graphics architecture is the backbone of the company’s entire SoC product line, from smartphones to tablets to PCs. Unsurprisingly, however, the Adreno graphics engine on board the Snapdragon X Elite is the company’s most powerful yet, rated at 4.6 TFLOPS of compute performance. It can also drive 4K displays at 120Hz and fully supports HDR10.

Qualcomm, again without naming names, said that the Snapdragon X Elite GPU performs 80% or even twice as much as its PC competitors, and matches the performance of competing solutions within 20-25% of the power consumption, according to 3DMark Wild . Life limit benchmark. Of course, this is compared to other integrated graphics solutions on the market.

Snapdragon Seamless: Collaboration across devices

In order to accompany this newly released chip, Qualcomm also launched the Snapdragon Seamless plan. The focus is on helping multi-device users (such as smartphones, tablets, and PCs) get their devices working and communicating together to get work done with a seamless experience. Qualcomm said its goal is to enable all devices based on its technology to understand what users are doing across the entire device ecosystem, extend battery life through low-power, high-performance chips, and enhance the strength of its device management ecosystem.

For example, Snapdragon Seamless-enabled devices can share a mouse and keyboard seamlessly Across PCs, mobile phones and tablets. Files and folders can be dragged from one device to another. The earbuds can intelligently switch based on the priority of audio sources, for example, using them with a computer until a phone rings, then switching without any intervention so the user can answer the call. If this all sounds familiar, that’s because Apple implements these features across Macs, iPads, and iPhones through Air Drop for files, universal controls for input devices, and the current H2 controllers in AirPods. Mac users already have this feature, now it’s time for PC users to get the same level of control and interoperability.