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Snapdragon X Elite has really taken the fight to Apple silicon in terms of performance, AI prowess and power efficiency. And now, at IFA 2024, Qualcomm is introducing a new lower cost Snapdragon X Plus variant that the company says will make AI laptops even more affordable — in fact, from just $700.
The very memorably named X1P-46-100 and X1P-42-100 chipsets (the “46” sports a faster clock speed and more powerful integrated graphics) sit at the bottom of the list of many Windows on Arm CPUs that Qualcomm has made — packing 8 cores rather than 10, but still giving you that same 45 Trillion Operations Per second (TOPs) of AI potential on that NPU.
Cheap but still powerful
The first concern I had upon reading the news is that while the NPU still gives you that AI power to effectively manage the Copilot+ PC features, does this downtuning of the chip compromise performance elsewhere?
Well, for most of your productivity needs, this is still a thoroughly decent chip based on benchmarking results. Sure, it’s not going to set the world on fire, but there’s enough here to get stuff done.
| Chip | Geekbench 6 single-core | Geekbench 6 multicore |
|---|---|---|
| Snapdragon X Plus 8-core X1P-46-100 | 2780 - 2813 | 11713 - 12001 |
| Snapdragon X Plus 8-core X1P-42-100 | 2385 - 2445 | 11027 - 11530 |
| Apple M3 MacBook Air | 3082 | 12087 |
So as you can see, single-core and multicore performance takes a hit, and you’ll see a similar dip in graphics too with framerates in WildLife Extreme Vulkan hitting up to 26 FPS on the more powerful version.
Low cost Copilot+ PCs
Expect to see laptop makers announce a whole bunch of new systems sporting these chips — and we’re hoping they keep up their side of the bargain and bring them to market from $700.
I’m excited to get my hands on one (currently, we’re seeing systems from the likes of Asus and more set to launch soon), because this reduced performance could lead to improved battery life too. Let’s see...
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