Qualcomm’s first Snapdragon X Elite chip for Windows PCs is a 12-core processor with up to 45 TOPS AI performance



PC makers have been shipping Windows PCs with Qualcomm’s ARM-based processors since 2018 , and so far they’ve mostly been pretty underwhelming when it comes to bang for the buck. Qualcomm is hoping to turn that around with its new Snapdragon X line of high-performance chips for PCs.
The first is the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite , which is a 4nm chip that incorporates 12 Qualcomm Oryon CPU cores, Adreno graphics, and an integrated Hexagon neural processing unit that the company says makes this chip a “generative AI powerhouse.” Qualcomm says the first PCs featuring Snapdragon X Elite chips should arrive in mid-2024.
Qualcomm’s Oryon CPU cores are the first to incorporate technology from Nuvia, a chip design company that Qualcomm acquired two years ago in an effort to better compete with Apple, which currently makes some of the highest performance PC chips available using custom designs based on ARM architecture.
The Snapdragon X Elite has 12 Oryon cores. Unlike most high-performance ARM or x86 chips available these days, there are no Performance and Efficiency cores. All of this chip’s CPU cores are high-performance Oryon cores. But you do get a little bit of extra performance when running single-threaded tasks, since one or two cores can hit top speeds up to 4.3 GHz, while when the processor is firing on all 12 cores, speeds top out at 3.8 GHz.
The chip’s Qualcomm Adreno integrated graphics offers up to 4.6 TFLOPS of GPU performance as well as support for DirectX 12.
And the Qualcomm hexagon NPU delivers up to 45 TOPS of AI performance. Qualcomm says its chip is also the “first PC processor with an integrated always-sensing ISP” that can be used for things like detecting if a person is front of the computer or eye tracking, among other things. This can, for example, allow a PC to lock the screen when you look away, automatically center you in the frame during video calls, or make it appear as if you’re looking at the camera when you’re actually glancing a bit to the side.