Processor designer Qualcomm has presented the first SoC for laptops that it based on technology it acquired with the acquisition of chip designer Nuvia. The soc is called X Elite and should appear in laptops next year.
Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite
The SoC provides ‘several days of battery life’ on laptops, Qualcomm claims. Exact battery life obviously depends on which battery laptop manufacturers put in the laptops and how high they set the TDP. The TDP of the SoC is scalable, although it can reach at least 50W.
TSMC manufactures the SoC on 4nm. It has twelve Oryon processor cores at up to 3.8GHz, with the option of boosting one or two cores to 4.3GHz. Those cores are based on the ARMv9 architecture. There are no more economical cores for lighter tasks. The GPU is an unnamed Adreno, the brand name that Qualcomm has used for almost fifteen years for built-in GPUs in SoCs. According to the manufacturer, it performs better than built-in GPUs from Intel and AMD processors.
In addition, there is an NPU cluster for AI tasks, which makes it possible to run large language models with 13 billion parameters locally. In addition, there is a ‘micro-NPU’ on the chip that is responsible for reading the sensors, presumably for things like facial recognition in Windows Hello. The SoC can be combined with a maximum of 64GB of lpddr5x memory with a bandwidth of 136GB/s. For storage, the Soc supports SD 3.0, NVMe over PCIe Gen 4 and UFS 4.0. The modem supports 5G up to 10Gbit/s and a maximum of Wi-Fi 7.
Qualcomm says it is working with Microsoft on compatibility on ARM systems with Windows, so that more and more apps run natively on ARM. The Snapdragon The first laptops with the Snapdragon X Elite should appear in the middle of next year, but further details are unknown.