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Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon X Plus processor platform for fast Windows laptops with long battery life.
Snapdragon X Plus features a 10-core Qualcomm Oryon CPU and a 45 TOPS neural processing unit (NPU) – the world’s fastest NPU for laptops – bringing unprecedented performance, efficiency and on-device AI capabilities to even more Windows PCs, the company said.
The Snapdragon X Plus processor is a slimmed-down version of the Snapdragon X Elite processor (which has slightly more power with 12 cores) platform that debuted in October. Qualcomm said the new version of the same platform will further disrupt the industry.
This platform will deliver exceptional performance, long battery life, and industry-leading on-device AI capabilities.
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Snapdragon X Plus features the state-of-the-art Qualcomm Oryon CPU, a custom-integrated processor that delivers up to 37% faster CPU performance compared to competitors, while consuming up to 54% less power.
This remarkable advancement in CPU performance sets a new standard in mobile computing, enabling users to accomplish more with greater efficiency, Qualcomm said. The CPU Performance comparison is based on GeekBench 2024 Mult-Thread on Windows 11 OS run in March 2024. Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus were tested using a Qualcomm reference design on Windows 11 OS.
Snapdragon X Plus is also designed to meet the demands of on-device AI-driven applications, powered by the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU capable of 45 TOPS, making it the world’s fastest NPU for laptops.
“Snapdragon X Series platforms deliver leading experiences and are positioned to revolutionize the PC industry. Snapdragon X Plus will power AI-Supercharged PCs that enable even more users to excel as radical new AI experiences emerge in this period of rapid development and deployment,” said Kedar Kondap, senior vice president and general manager of compute and gaming at Qualcomm Technologies, in a statement. “By delivering leading CPU performance, AI capabilities, and power efficiency, we are once again pushing the boundaries of what is possible in mobile computing.”
For the launch of the Snapdragon X Plus, Qualcomm Technologies demonstrated new AI-optimized applications and features running on the 45 TOPS NPU, including code generation in Visual Studio Code from Codegen, to assist programmers by generating fresh code instantly with on-device generative AI.
It also has music generation in Audacity, using Riffusion on-device AI, to generate new music from prompts or pre-existing music. It has live captions in OBS Studio, to provide automatic translation of 100 spoken languages into live captions in 100 languages using Whisper on-device, in real-time during livestreams.
OEMs are expected to launch PCs powered by Snapdragon X Plus alongside devices powered by
Snapdragon X Elite starting mid-2024.
In demos, Qualcomm showed Stable Diffusion running faster than other processors. The company also showed various AI demos and games running.
“We’re driving multiple use cases, with a lot of focus on AI in terms of models in running 30 billion parameter models,” said Nitin Kumar, vice president of product management for Snapdragon Compute at Qualcomm, in a briefing. “We’re very excited about the performance. We still expect Snapdragon X Plus to be significantly better in terms of performance. And we’re at about 65% less power.”
He added, “When you translate all of this into real-world use case and talk about things you would do every day, right from whether it is using Office 365 applications, local video playback, or its web browsing, or YouTube video. It’s a meaningful benefit to consumers in what they’re using every day.”
“From an application standpoint, we’ve made a lot of progress in partnership with Microsoft and a lot of the leading app developers who have now either ported their applications, or they’re running much better on the Snapdragon,” Kumar said.
