Qualcomm officially announces Snapdragon X Plus platform for laptops
Following a couple of recent leaks, today Qualcomm has taken the wraps off the Snapdragon X Plus platform for laptops. This is a step down from the Snapdragon X Elite, featuring a 10-core Oryon CPU clocked at up to 3.4 GHz (vs. 12-core in the Elite) and up to 64GB of RAM with 135 GB/s bandwidth.
The X Plus does however have a 45 TOPS NPU, which Qualcomm bills as the world's fastest NPU for laptops. The X Plus is expected to deliver "exceptional performance, long battery life, and industry-leading on-device AI capabilities".
Speaking of which, Qualcomm demonstrated code generation in Visual Studio Code from Codegen (generating fresh code instantly with on-device AI), music generation in Audacity using Riffusion on-device AI to generate new music from prompts or pre-existing music, and live captions in OBS Studio, providing automatic translation of 100 spoken languages into live captions in 100 languages using Whisper on-device, in real-time during livestreams.
Laptops using the chip (along with the X Elite) should appear "from leading global OEMs" starting around the middle of this year.
The Oryon CPU in the X Plus delivers 37% faster performance compared to some unnamed competitors, while also consuming up to 54% less power. The chip supports LPDDR5x, has 42MB total cache, and is built on a 4nm process. The X Plus supports 3 external displays all at 4K HDR (but at 60 Hz maximum), and it comes with Wi-Fi 7 support, Bluetooth 5.4, an advanced camera ISP, and "immersive lossless audio".