Qualcomm has officially unveiled its Snapdragon X Plus computing platform, following recent rumours of its launch. It lands six months after the company announced its flagship chipset, the Snapdragon X Elite, in October last year.
As the name implies, the SD X Plus is a small step down from the SD X Elite. It features a 10-core Oryon CPU which, if our math is correct, is two fewer than the 12-core X Elite. It supports up to 64GB of LPDDR5x system memory and boasts a 135GB/s bandwidth. It’s supposed to be 37% faster than competitors, although Qualcomm didn’t say which competitors those were.
Alongside the Oryon CPU, you’ll find an Adreno GPU with a lower but still respectable floating-point performance (FP32) of 3.8 TFLOPS (tera floating-point operations per second) compared to the 4.6 TFLOPS of the X Elite.
Snapdragon X platform TOPS on-device AI
Joining the CPU and GPU is Qualcomm’s 45 TOPS NPU, or 45 trillion-operations-per-second neural processing unit — try saying that three times — which it says is the fastest in the world – because of course it would.
That’s a lot of operations per second, you might be thinking. What can one do with all those operations? Qualcomm showed off just that by instantly generating lines of code in Visual Studio Code, new music based on prompts in Audacity, and live captions in OBS Studio all through on-device AI.
That last one, for example, will be useful for streamers who can add live captions to their stream which can be automatically translated into 100 supported languages in real time without much human intervention.
Additional extra goodies include support for up to three external 4K HDR monitors (although they’ll be capped at 60Hz), Wi-Fi 7 (although that has yet to see mainstream adoption), Bluetooth 5.4, an “advanced” image signal processor, and “immersive lossless audio” which sounds a lot like Snapdragon Sound.
The Snapdragon X Plus, along with the Snapdragon X Elite, should start appearing in laptops later this year from the brands that you’d expect to feature them.