Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite: Competition for Apple, Intel and AMD chips

At the Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm presented a new arm-based system-on-a-chip (SoC) for notebooks and convertibles. The first devices with the Snapdragon X Elite are set to appear from mid-2024. The new SoC should be able to compete with Arm chips from Apple (M2) as well as x86 chips from Intel and AMD.

Snapdragon X Elite - what the SoC has to offer

With the new high-end SoC, Qualcomm is also introducing a new naming convention (X instead of 8cx). The Snapdragon X Elite is manufactured in the 4 nm process at TSMC. Unlike current Intel processors, for example, the CPU is not built according to the little-big principle. There are no performance and efficiency cores, but twelve Oryon cores. Qualcom already introduced these last year. They are based on a proprietary reference design. Funnily enough, Oryon was developed by the company Nuvia, which was only acquired by Qualcomm in 2021. Nuvia was originally founded by former Apple chip developers.

The Arm SoC contains the following:

• 12 x high-performance cores (Oryon), ten of which clock at up to 3.8 gigahertz (GHz) and two at up to 4.3 GHz
• 42 megabytes of cache
• Adreno iGPU with 4.6 TFLOPs performance
• Neural Processing Unit with 45 TOPs performance
• Image Signal Processor with support for 64 megapixel photos and 2160p HDR videos
• Decoder for H.264, H.265, VP9 and AV1 (maximum 2160p and 120 FPS)
• Encoder for H.264, H.265 and AV1 (maximum 2160p and 60 FPS)
• X65 5G modem
• Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4
• Supports up to four displays - one internal with 4K and 120 Hertz and three external with 4K and 60 Hertz
• Supports up to 64 gigabytes of LPDDR5x-8533 SDRAM with a bandwidth of 136 gigabytes per second
• Supports PCIe 4.0 SSDs
• Supports up to six USB-C ports, three of which can have the USB4 standard

This is the first time in Qualcomm's history that cores with over 4 GHz are being used. Instead of three external displays with 4K resolution at 60 Hertz, two 5K displays with 60 Hertz can also be used.

Better than Apple's M2 and Intel's Core i7-13800H

Even though Qualcomm will already have to compete with Intel's Meteor Lake and Apple's M3 Max when it is released in mid-2024, the manufacturer has not refrained from providing performance data on current chips.

The single-thread performance is said to be 13.5 per cent higher than Apple's M2 Max thanks to 4.3 GHz Turbo in Geekbench 6.2.1 - with 3227 to 2841 points. It should also be roughly the same as Intel's Core i9-13980HX, which achieved 3192 points. Compared to the Apple SoC, it is said to consume 30 per cent less energy with the same performance. Compared to Intel, the power consumption at peak performance is said to be 70 per cent lower.

In multi-threaded mode, the performance of the Snapdragon is said to be up to 50 per cent higher than that of an Apple M2. No wonder, since the Snapdragon has twelve cores and the Apple chip only eight. Compared to current Intel x86-based SoCs with twelve cores, the Snapdragon is said to achieve twice the performance, or the same performance with only a third of the energy consumption. Compared to an Intel SoC with 14 cores, the Core i7-13800H, the performance is still said to be up to 60 per cent better.

The Adreno iGPU on the SoC is said to be about twice as powerful as the iGPU of an Intel Core i7-13800H. If the Adreno calls up the peak performance of the Intel GPU, the power consumption is said to be 74 per cent lower. Compared to the iGPU of an AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS, the Adreno is said to be 80 per cent more powerful. With the same performance, it is said to consume 80 per cent less energy.

As always, all performance data should be treated with caution. Whether Qualcomm can help Windows on Arm achieve a definitive breakthrough with the new Snapdragon is questionable. However, there are some indications that Arm will also be increasingly used for Windows in the coming years. This week, AMD and Nvidia announced that they will also be producing Arm chips for Windows from 2025. However, Qualcomm still has exclusive rights until the end of 2024.