Snapdragon X Elite is Qualcomm's latest ARM-based chipset for laptops

The brand new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile chip is set to power the latest flagship Android smartphones and tablets but Qualcomm also announced its next-gen high-end chip for Windows on ARM laptops – the Snapdragon X Elite. Qualcomm hopes it can capture a larger chunk of the PC chipset market with its latest SoC and it’s betting big on performance and efficiency.

Snapdragon X Elite is fabbed on a 4nm process node and features 12 high-performance Oryon cores clocked at 3.8 GHz with single and dual-core boost up to 4.3 GHz. Qualcomm states that its new CPU matches competing Intel 13th gen CPUs on multi-threaded performance while drawing 68% less power. There’s a comparison to Apple’s own ARM-based M2 chip with the Snapdragon X Elite claiming 50% faster peak multi-threaded performance.

On the graphics side, X Elite features an integrated Adreno GPU rated at 4.6 TFLOPs with support for DirectX 12 API. The chip can handle up to 3x external UHD monitors at 60Hz. Video editors can take advantage of the Adreno video processing unit (VPU) which supports 4K60 10-bit encodes and decodes for H.264, HEVC (H.265) and AV1 files.

Qualcomm also added a Hexagon NPU with 45 Tera operations per second (TOPs) which excels at Generative AI tasks. Snapdragon X Elite can handle over 13 billion parameters running on device and generate 30 tokens per second.

The chip supports LPDDR5x RAM with up to 136 GB/s memory bandwidth and 42MB total cache alongside PCIe Gen4 or UFS 4.0 storage. In terms of connectivity, Snapdragon X Elite gets a FastConnect 7800 System with support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 as well as a Snapdragon X65 5G modem for cellular connectivity with up to 10 Gbps peak download speeds.

X Elite supports lossless audio playback thanks to the Qualcomm Aqstic DAC and it also features the Qualcomm Spectra image signal processor (ISP) with support for up to 36MP dual cameras and 4K HDR video capture.