The eight-core Snapdragon X Plus laptop processor is Qualcomm’s latest bid to lower the starting price of mobile CoPilot+ PC Windows systems with its new chips.
In the year since Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon X series of laptop processors, two concerns have undermined their promise of an Apple Silicon-esque combination of long battery life and high performance.
One has been compatibility with Windows apps and drivers written for AMD and Intel processors—a big part of its announcements at the Snapdragon Summit this week. Another has been cost, with the first round of Snapdragon X Elite laptops starting at relatively high prices.
Qualcomm took one step toward addressing that second concern when it introduced the cheaper Snapdragon X Plus series of chips, first in a version with 10 cores and now in a still more affordable eight-core version.
Laptops based on this branch of the Snapdragon X family tree are starting to arrive at considerably cheaper prices. For example, Lenovo’s lineup starts at just $749. But what kind of performance can you expect from Qualcomm’s cheaper Snapdragon X Plus eight-core chips?Testing Eight-Core Snapdragon X Plus‘ Mettle
Back at IFA 2024, Qualcomm hosted a benchmarking session for journalists to give them a sense of the cheaper X Plus’s performance. The company provided a set of Asus Vivobook S 15 ($839.99 as tested) laptops, each running on a Snapdragon X Plus X1P-42-100 processor representing the low end of the Snapdragon X hierarchy (PDF). The laptops were set up with a suite of benchmarking apps, and journalists were then allowed to run those apps as they saw fit.
