Qualcomm Unveils the Snapdragon X, an AI PC Chip Powering Copilot+ Machines for as Little as $600
Fourth entry in the series does away with suffixes and cuts the price, while still offering eight 3GHz CPU cores and a 45 TOPS NPU.
Qualcomm Technologies has announced the fourth entry in its Snapdragon X series of system-on-chips (SoCs), this time simply dubbed "Snapdragon X," which it hopes will deliver artificially intelligent laptops and other portables at a lower cost — down as low as $600, the company says.
"The Snapdragon X Series portfolio offers the most powerful, intelligent, and power-efficient processors for [Microsoft] Windows in their class, making Copilot+ PCs powered by Snapdragon the ultimate choice for users who want a laptop that can do it all," claims Qualcomm's Alex Katouzian, group general manager of the expanded SoC line-up. "Our ecosystem of partners continues to build on Snapdragon to deliver innovative form factors and premium AI [Artificial Intelligence] experiences that enable everyday PC users who want a laptop that can keep up with their busy lives."
The Snapdragon X, the fourth in the family that bears its name, features eight 64-bit Arm-based Qualcomm Oryon CPU cores running at up to a rather precise 2.976GHz, an Adreno graphics processing unit (GPU) delivering a claimed 1.7 tera-floating point operations per second (TFLOPS) of compute, and the same Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU) coprocessor as others parts in the family, with a claimed 45 tera-operations per second (TOPS) compute performance at minimum precision. A separate "Qualcomm Sensing Hub" adds a pair of "micro-NPUs" dedicated to driving an always-on image signal processor (ISP).
The chip, Qualcomm claims, is more than twice as fast as an Intel Core i5-1280U for single-core general-purpose compute, while offering the machine learning and artificial intelligence acceleration required to participate in Microsoft's Copilot+ program. That it has in common with others in the Snapdragon X range, all of which use the same NPU — but the part comes with another promise, too: that it will appear in Copilot+ Windows 11 laptops and compact desktops starting "in the $600 range," from partners including Acer, Asus, Dell Technologies, HP, and Lenovo.
More information on the Snapdragon X is available on the Qualcomm website; the company has promised to release more details on the promised "mini desktop PC" powered by the chip at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week.