Qualcomm recently announced the expansion of its Snapdragon X Series platform with the new Snapdragon X Plus, which according to the manufacturer promises exceptional performance, long battery life, and capable on-device AI capabilities for Windows-powered PCs. Kedar Kondap, Qualcomm’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Compute and Gaming states:
“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… By delivering leading CPU performance, AI capabilities, and power efficiency, we are once again pushing the boundaries of what is possible in mobile computing.”
With that in mind, the Snapdragon X Plus comes with an impressive set of new features – it’s powered by the state-of-the-art 10-core Qualcomm Oryon CPU, a 45 TOPS NPU which Qualcomm claims is the fastest on the market right now. Another major highlight of the Snapdragon X Plus is on-device AI capabilities, a rather unsurprising (but much-welcome) add-on given the focus on GenAI within current tech industry trends.
Qualcomm has also developed the Snapdragon X Plus to provide optimized usage for streaming, downloading, syncing and other data-centric tasks, allowing for seamless on-the-go productivity. There’s support for 5G and Wi-Fi 7 with HBS Multi-Link, which Qualcomm says results in blazing-fast, lag-free connectivity for work.
Users can also easily switch between devices with Snapdragon SeamlessTM without the need for cords and cables, and immerse themselves in high-fidelity audio with Snapdragon SoundTM, with support for lossless music and entertainment via wireless audio hardware. Finally, the Snapdragon X Plus packs built-in user security with the Qualcomm Secure Processing Unit featuring Microsoft Pluton TPM, total memory encryption, and Microsoft Secured-core PC support.
To showcase the power of the Snapdragon X Plus’s 45 TOPS NPU, Qualcomm unveiled several AI-optimized applications which included code generation in Visual Studio Code with Codegen, allowing programmers to get instant help with on-device generative AI. Music creation in Audacity also received a boost with Riffusion, enabling users to generate new music based on prompts or existing tracks, all processed directly on-device. Live streamers can now leverage Whisper for real-time, multi-language captioning in OBS Studio, translating spoken languages into captions in real-time during streams.
As for availability, Qualcomm wasn’t specific about which brands will first feature the new chip, although folks can expect to see Snapdragon X Plus PCs launch around mid-2024. With all that being said, it should be interesting to see how Qualcomm’s Arm hardware fares in real-world use and on market-ready devices, given the company’s big promises to deliver on portable computing power. Of course with Apple’s M-series chips currently ranking among the best in the industry, the Snapdragon X Plus has its work cut out.
