The Snapdragon X Elite reveals the cards. The star processor will exist in four variants – SMARTmania.cz

• Windows PCs will finally get a competitive ARM processor this year
• The Snapdragon X Elite was revealed last year, but only now are its parameters coming to the surface
• Top models will offer 12 processor cores and an extremely powerful neural unit

In just a few weeks, Qualcomm will try to turn the Windows PC world upside down. The American company wants to repeat Apple’s four-year-old success and show that ARM processors have a place in the computer world. Its iron in the fire will be the Snapdragon X Elite chipset, which was first revealed last October, but we still don’t know its parameters. Now a table of specifications, which the upcoming chipset will boast of, has reached the Internet.

The Snapdragon X Elite will arrive in four versions

When Qualcomm introduced its computer processor last year, it rather creatively boasted that it was ahead of the Intel Core i9 or Apple M2 Max processors. Qualcomm promised high processor and graphics performance, as well as absolute dominance in the field of artificial intelligence. On the last point, we have to agree with Qualcomm, because the Snapdragon X Elite contains a dedicated neural unit with a tremendous performance of 45 TOPS – for comparison, competing processors from Intel have an NPU with a performance of 10 TOPS, AMD has 16 TOPS.

According to information from the Neowin server, the Snapdragon X Elite is to be offered in a total of three versions, while the fourth upcoming variant is to be called the Snapdragon X Plus. While the Elite models are supposed to boast 12 processor cores, the Plus variant is supposed to have only ten of them – 6 powerful and 4 efficient.

At the top of the ranking is the Snapdragon X Elite with the model designation X1E-84-100, which offers the highest clock speed of the processor and graphics unit, the other model variants will be a little worse off. It is pleasing that the performance of the neural unit will be the same for all variants, the same applies to the capacity of the cache, which will always be 42 MB.

Qualcomm recently revealed that the Snapdragon X Elite should also be suitable for occasional gaming, but depending on the parameters, it will tighten older or less demanding games. The graphics chip is supposed to have a performance of 4.6 TFLOPs in the highest configuration, which is roughly at the level of the Intel Iris Xe chip in Intel Core Ultra processors. However, the Radeon 780M mobile graphics card has twice the performance. If we look at the benchmark performance of the Snadpragon X Elite/Plus, we get roughly the following numbers:

It should be noted that all the benchmarks recorded so far have been performed on devices with at least 16 GB of RAM, so it is possible that computers with Snapdragon X Elite and 8 GB of RAM will not even be sold. According to a recent leak, Microsoft is preparing a new AI Explorer feature for Windows 11, requiring at least 16 GB of RAM and a Snapdragon X Elite-level neural unit. AI Explorer will probably be tailored to the new Snapdragon.

Most of the benchmarks come from the yet-to-be-announced Microsoft Surface 10 and Surface Laptop 6 consumer PCs, set to be unveiled on May 20 on the eve of Microsoft’s Build developer conference. Even before that, however, Qualcomm will probably present the Snapdragon X Elite in detail – it has a press conference scheduled for tomorrow, which will undoubtedly be about the new processor.