Qualcomm debuts Snapdragon X Elite with incredible power efficiency

Today, Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon X Elite. This is the new flagship processor that Qualcomm will be pushing for laptops. It recently announced the new naming scheme for these desktop-class processors, and this is the first one to go under that new name.

Qualcomm is touting that the Snapdragon X Elite has “Best-in-class CPU with high performance and remarkable power efficiency”. Which is rather impressive for an ARM-based processor that can be used in laptops.

The Snapdragon X Elite is pretty powerful, it’s using Qualcomm’s new Oryon CPU, which uses a 64-bit architecture. It has 12 cores, up to 3.8GHz clock speeds. And it also has single and dual-core boost up to 4.3GHz. So this is a pretty powerful processor here. It also has the Qualcomm Adreno GPU with up to 4.6 TFLOPs.

Finally, connectivity. On the Snapdragon X Elite, there is support for WiFi 7, as well as WiFi 6E and WiFi 6. There’s also support for WiFi bands including 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz. Which is huge for laptops, which can really take advantage of those faster speeds. When it comes to Bluetooth, there’s also support for Bluetooth 5.4 here. We can’t forget about USB support, which comes with USB 4.0, and it can support up to three USB-C ports.

Snapdragon X Elite was built for AI

Much like the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the new Snapdragon X Elite was also built for AI. Which is the new buzzword, so no surprise that Qualcomm is doing it too. The Qualcomm AI Engine with has an integrated Qualcomm Hexagon NPU which delivers experiences for creativity, video conferencing, security and productivity assistants. Qualcomm claims that Snapdragon X Elite is capable of running Generative AI LLM models over 13 billion parameters on-device and there’s also blazing-fast speeds.

Qualcomm says that PCs with the new Snapdragon X Elite processor is going to be available starting in mid-2024. Qualcomm has not mentioned which PC vendors are using the Snapdragon X Elite. But in the past, we have seen PCs with Snapdragon processors from Lenovo and Samsung, among a few others.