snap — Qualcomm says lower-end Snapdragon X Plus chips can still outrun Apples M3 Same NPU, same architecture as X Elite, but fewer cores and lower clock speeds.
Andrew Cunningham – Apr 25, 2024 12:26 pm UTC EnlargeQualcomm reader comments 65
Qualcomms Snapdragon X series of chips promises to be the companys first that can go toe-to-toe with Apple Silicon, and the PC ecosystem is reacting accordingly. Microsoft reportedly plans for the Arm version of its next Surface tablet to be the flagship, and major apps like Chrome and Dropbox have recently released Arm-native Windows versions for the first time.
Ahead of the chips’ launch late this year, Qualcomm announced a new lower-end model destined for cheaper devices. Dubbed the Snapdragon X Plus, it shares a lot in common with the flagship Snapdragon X Elite. Further ReadingIs the Arm version of Windows ready for its close-up?
The Snapdragon X Plus includes 10 CPU cores instead of the Elites 12, though the more noticeable change is its lack of support for clock-speed boosting; the chips 3.4 GHz base frequency is as fast as it goes, where the Elite chips can boost two cores to 4.2 GHz and one core up to 4.3 GHz, depending on the specific model. Qualcomm also rates the X Plus integrated GPU at 3.8 TFLOPs, down from the X Elites maximum of 4.6 TFLOPs. Aside from those high-level FLOP numbers, we still know very little about how the GPU will be configured; we also dont know the ratio of big and little CPU cores. Advertisement
Qualcomm says the Snapdragon X Plus multi-threaded performance still compares favorably to Apples M3, outrunning it by about 10 percent; Qualcomm doesnt provide any single-core scores, which are presumably less flattering. The company also says it outruns Intels Core Ultra 7 155H and AMD’s Ryzen 9 7940HS chips in multi-core performance when the chips are using the same power, or it can match those x86 chips’ performance while using 65 percent less power.
All Snapdragon X chips share the same basic Oryon CPU architecture, developed by the former Apple Silicon engineers that Qualcomm acquired when it bought a company called Nuvia in 2021. The Elite and Plus chips also use the same 4nm manufacturing process and the exact same neural processing unit (NPU). This ensures that both chips will meet Microsofts rumored requirements for AI PCs, a list of specs that also includes 16GB of RAM and (for some reason) the dedicated Copilot key. The X Elite and X Plus chips all support up to 64GB of LPDDR5X memory.
Its not clear what AI PCs will be able to do that regular non-AI PCs cant, but its likely that theyll be able to run some version of the Copilot generative AI assistant locally on-device. Testers have also found an AI-focused revamp of Windows Explorer in recent testing builds. Microsoft recently released Phi-3-mini, a smaller language model that claims to be able to match GPT 3.5s performance using 3.8 billion parameters instead of 175 billion. This would be well-suited to on-device processingfewer parameters means lower system requirements, faster performance, and a smaller footprint on disk. reader comments 65 Andrew Cunningham Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Advertisement Channel Ars Technica ← Previous story Next story → Related Stories Today on Ars
