Qualcomm has announced its new Snapdragon X Elite chip which the company claims is the most powerful computing processor to date. The chip has been built on a 4nm process and includes 136GB/s of memory bandwidth. The company says PC including the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite platform will start to ship in the middle of 2024. Alongside the Snapdragon X Elite, the company also announced the new Qualcomm Oryon mobile chip.
During its announcement, Qualcomm made some bold claims. The company showed off some slides that showed the Snapdragon X Elite to be “more powerful” than the Intel Core i7. How much more powerful isn’t clear. The graph just shows the arc set higher than Intel’s Core i7. No one really knows what the y-axis on the graph (seen below) means.
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In the same presentation, Qualcomm says the Snapdragon X Elite will deliver 50% faster peak multi-thread performance than Apple’s M2 chip. Keep in mind that the Snapdragon X Elite has 50% more cores than the M2 and uses double the power so obviously, it will beat the M2 chip. If anything, the comparison is like comparing a VW Polo with a BMW.
That is to say, the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is definitely a powerful chip. The company is just going about marketing its performance in all the wrong ways. It also comes with Snapdragon Seamless which is a cross-platform technology that enables Android, Windows and Snapdragon devices using other operating systems to discover one another and share content across devices. Sort of like AirDrop.
Using Snapdragon Seamless, users can drag and drop files and windows across devices, share screens and even have their wireless audio tech move from one device to the other. The company says multiple brands have already signed on to support Snapdragon Seamless including Microsoft, Google, Dell, Lenovo, Honor and Oppo.
Of course, while it is nice to see new chipsets from Qualcomm, the real-world performance is still a mystery. The company simply showed off some graphs and used Apple’s marketing jargon such as “four times faster” without showing any real numbers. We’ll have to see how this all works out when devices start to ship next year.
Source: Qualcomm
