Aside from the much-anticipated Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, Qualcomm also announced its new laptop CPU with the Snapdragon X Elite. Qualcomm has bold promises for its new laptop chip, which utilizes a 12-core Oryon design that maxes out at 4.3Ghz in Dual-Core Boost and 3.8Ghz at single-core boost. 

In its claims, Qualcomm said that the Oryon design can match the peak performance of its rivals while only using around 1/3 of the power consumption.

Data provided by Qualcomm compared its latest ARM-based computer chip to Intel’s i7-1355U, i7-1360P, i7-13800H, and even the Apple M2. Against both Intel chips, Qualcomm claims as much as 2x better performance with the Snapdragon X Elite. Qualcomm even compared it to AMD’s Ryzen 9 7940HS, claiming that the Snapdragon X Elite can beat it in terms of GPU performance.

Qualcomm even went as far as claiming up to 50% better multi-threaded performance over Apple’s M2 chip. This part is an unfair comparison, as the base Apple M2 chip only has half the cores of the Snapdragon X Elite–that should explain why it literally floored Apple’s in-house processor in multi-threaded performance.

Unfair comparison aside, we still hope that Qualcomm’s new computer chip can match the Apple M2 since there are limited options for ARM-based chips on Windows laptops. While Qualcomm has started making ARM-based Windows chips with the Snapdragon 8CX, but adoption rate is still not high enough to make ARM-based chips good alternatives to offerings from Intel and AMD.

Snapdragon X Elite-powered machines are expected to arrive in mid-2024, and we hope to see more devices use this new computer chip from Qualcomm.