Not only does the Snapdragon X Elite feature a powerful NPU – it has about 4X the raw performance of AMD and Intel NPUs when measured on.
Something to look forward to: After years of monotony and relative stasis in the PC industry, things are starting to change. And man, it’s getting exciting again! Earlier this year, AMD launched the Ryzen 7040, the first PC SoC with a built-in NPU (Neural Processing Unit) – otherwise known as an AI accelerator. Then a few weeks ago, Intel debuted its Core Ultra chip featuring its own AI accelerator. Now Qualcomm is putting an exclamation point on the AI PC trend with the launch of its Snapdragon X Elite SoC for PCs.
Not only does the Snapdragon X Elite feature a powerful NPU – it has about 4X the raw performance of AMD and Intel NPUs when measured on a TOPs (Tera Operations per Second) basis – it also marks the long-awaited debut of the Oryon CPU.
Based on tech that Qualcomm acquired years back from a company called Nuvia, Oryon is an Arm-based CPU that offers surprisingly strong capabilities. In this first implementation, Qualcomm is combining 12 CPU cores running at 3.8 GHz (two can boost up to 4.3 GHz) and building the chip on a 4 nm process.
Interestingly, while Qualcomm is initially using Oryon for PCs, they expect this to become the CPU core in future generation of chips dedicated to mobile, automotive, XR and other applications as well.
The Snapdragon X Elite benchmarks that Qualcomm showed off at a recent event have the Oryon-equipped chips beating the speed of Apple’s M2 Max chip in single-threaded performance or match its multi-threaded performance with 30% less power.
It can also beat the Intel’s Core i9-13980HX in single-threaded performance or match its multi-threaded performance at 70% less power (all Qualcomm’s numbers and tests, of course).
For multi-threaded performance, the numbers were equally impressive, with Qualcomm saying it was 50% better than Apple’s M2 and up to 2x faster than some Intel CPUs.
There’s no doubt that it’s an impressive leap forward in performance and brings a new sense of relevancy to Arm-based PCs… or it will.
As with everything in the computing world, your mileage may vary depending on the specific applications you need to run.
