Snapdragon X Plus will bring ARM to ‘even more’ Windows laptops, still said to beat Apple M3

Ben Schoon | Apr 24 2024 - 6:00 am PT

While it’s still yet to debut, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite is looking like a big deal for ARM-powered Windows machines and, now, it’s getting a more affordable cousin in the Snapdragon X Plus.

Announced today, Snapdragon X Plus is based on the same Oryon CPU as Snapdragon X Elite, just with a bit less power. The chip has 10 cores to the Elite’s 12, and is also clocked down from the Elite’s 3.8GHz to 3.4GHz.

In a multi-threaded CPU benchmark, Snapdragon X Plus fell about 2,000 points lower than the Snapdragon X Elite, but still managed to outdo Apple’s M3 chip by about 10%. It’s also still considerably more power efficient compared to traditional x86 chips, using approximately 54% less power at peak performance compared to Intel Core Ultra 7155H.

Qualcomm explains:

Advertisement - scroll for more content

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.

Top comment by Brian Marsh

Liked by 4 people

More competition is good. Hopefully it will mean that Microsoft starts selling an ARM version of Windows to the public which would make it easier to get for Parallels/VMware Fusion.

But the comparisons with the base M3 are intentional by Qualcomm - the Base M3 has 4 efficiency cores, and 4 performance cores - the Snapdragon X Plus has 10 performance cores and the X Elite has 12 performance cores. The M3 Pro would be closer to the X Elite with 11-12 cores (although 6 efficiency, and 5 or 6 performance cores) which the Geekbench multi-core does seem to show X Elite gets around 15,000 and so does the 12 core M3 Pro - the M3 Max has 4 efficiency and 12 performance which jumps it's multi-core performance to around 21,000.

And so far I haven't seen them compare graphics performance - but maybe I just missed something where they do compare that. (Looking on Geekbench only 1 entry for Compute/GPU and it shows an OpenCL of 23584 - the base M3 gets just over 30,000, and the M3 Pro gets around 43,000)

View all comments

Snapdragon X Plus also matches the Elite on NPU performance, which should be a big boost as “AI PCs” continue to be a big focus on Windows.

While Qualcomm doesn’t say it outright, the company says Plus will enable this technology to be in the hands of “even more users,” hinting that this chip will be priced more aggressively.

No specific laptops have been announced with Snapdragon X Plus – or Elite, for that matter – but Qualcomm says to expect more on that in “mid-2024.” Microsoft is expected to be among the first to adopt the new Snapdragon chips with new Surface hardware being announced soon.