Qualcomm’s more affordable Snapdragon X Plus laptop chips are here, but can they beat Apple’s entry-level MacBook?
After the first premium Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptops launched earlier this year, the mobile silicon maker announced a more budget-friendly Plus version of its Arm-based chip for Windows. This week, the introduction of an eight-core Snapdragon X Plus mode made things even more interesting for affordable laptops.
If you want the battery and AI benefits of a Copilot Plus PC but without the flagship costs, you’ll probably be interested in one of these new chips, so long as it performs decently. At IFA 2024, we attended a benchmarking session to put the new chip through its paces.
Qualcomm had two models to showcase. A higher-end reference laptop sporting the X1P-46-100 chip and an Asus Vivobook S15 with the most affordable X1P-42-100 variant. You can see their specs below.
We also grabbed the results from our previous Snapdragon X Elite benchmarking session to see how the new chip compares to its bigger brother and some of Apple’s silicon we’d previously tested.
As you’d expect, the drop-down from twelve Oryon CPU cores in the X Elite chip to just eight in the new, much smaller Plus model has a big effect on multi-core CPU performance.
