Qualcomm is entering the lower end of the market with its Arm chipset for laptops. The company is releasing an 8-core variant of its Snapdragon X Plus processor, intended to bring Windows 11 Copilot+ PCs within reach of customers with a more constrained budget and less need for the highest performance.
The company announced the new, lower-cost chipset at the IFA event in Berlin. This entry-level model should run Windows on Arm laptops, priced between 700 and 900 dollars (between 600 and 800 euros). That makes it a more affordable version of the Copilot+ models that entered the market earlier this year. These laptops were the first of their kind with Arm architecture instead of x86.
Tip: These major computer brands have already announced their own Copilot+ pc’s
At the time, all Copilot+ PCs ran on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Series chips based on Arm architecture. This chipset contains the Oryon CPU, an integrated Adreno-type GPU, and a Hexagon NPU. To run software based on x86 architecture on these devices, Microsoft provides the Prism emulator.
The just-announced eight-core Snapdragon X Plus processor comes in two variants with different clock speeds: one with a standard speed of 3.4GHz, boostable to 4.0GHz, and one with a 3.2GHz base clock speed and 3.4GHz when boosted. Despite the lower clock speeds and slightly lower graphics performance (1.7 TFLOPS vs. 2.1 TFLOPS), Qualcomm promises excellent performance and tremendous power efficiency. The chips include 30 MB of cache memory and support for LPDDR5x memory, with 45 TOPS of NPU performance. With the latter, the chipset rivals the performance of the more powerful 10- and 12-core chips in the first Copilot+ PCs.
Major OEM’s on board
Qualcomm claims the new processor achieves about 80 percent of the performance achieved by the 10- and 12-core flagship models. It is also said to outperform Apple’s M2 chip in several benchmarks, particularly in areas such as NPU performance, memory, and connectivity.
In any case, major manufacturers such as Dell, Asus and Lenovo have already started offering entry-level laptops equipped with these new Arm chips. For Dell, these are its upcoming Inspiron 14 and the Latitude 5455. Notably, that company will also release the XPS 13, a Copilot+ PC powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 2, based on x86 architecture.
Intel has missed the boat in terms of market developments several times in recent years but has now announced the ‘Lunar Lake’ Core Ultra 200V chips. These are also Copilot+-proof, promise energy efficiency, and are optimally compatible with a host of software that simply refuses to run on Qualcomm hardware.
Also read: Intel launches Core Ultra 2, the answer to Qualcomm and AMD