As Qualcomm prepares for the mid-year launch of their forthcoming Snapdragon X SoCs for PCs, and the eagerly anticipated Oryon CPU cores inside, the corporate is lastly shoring up their official product plans, and releasing some extra technical particulars within the course of. Thus far the corporate has been demonstrating their Snapdragon X Elite SoC in its highest-performing, fully-enabled configuration. But the retail Snapdragon X Elite won’t be a single half; as a substitute, Qualcomm is getting ready an entire vary of chip configurations for numerous worth/efficiency tiers available in the market. Altogether, there might be 3 Snapdragon X Elite SKUs that differ in CPU and GPU efficiency.
As effectively, the corporate is introducing a second Snapdragon X tier, Snapdragon X Plus, for these SKUs positioned under the Elite efficiency tier. As of at this time, this might be a single configuration. But if the Snapdragon X lineup is profitable and demand warrants it, I’d not be stunned to see Qualcomm develop it additional – as they’ve actually left themselves the room for it of their product stack. In the meantime, with Qualcomm’s anticipated launch competitors now transport (Intel Core Ultra Meteor Lake and AMD Ryzen Mobile 8040 Hawk Point), the corporate can also be very assured that even these diminished efficiency Snapdragon X Plus chips will have the ability to beat Intel and AMD in multithreaded efficiency – by no means thoughts the top-tier Snapdragon X Elite chips.
Qualcomm might be launching this expanded 4 chip stack directly; so each Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus tier units must be obtainable on the identical time. The firm’s aim remains to be to have units on the shelf “mid-year”, though the corporate isn’t offering any extra exact steering than that. With Microsoft’s Build convention going down in late May, and Qualcomm’s CEO, Cristiano Amon, set to ship a Computex keynote in June, I anticipate we’ll get extra particular particulars on timings round these two occasions. Meanwhile, Computex is a main venue for Qualcomm and its companions to announce and showcase some retail laptop computer designs. So that is very a lot wanting like a summer time launch for the time being.
In the meantime, Qualcomm is already exhibiting off what their Snapdragon X Plus chips can do with a recent set of reside benchmarks, akin to their Snapdragon X Elite efficiency previews from October 2023. We’ll dive into these in a bit, however suffice it to say, Qualcomm is aware of the rating, they usually wish to be certain your complete world is aware of after they’re successful.
Snapdragon X Chip Stack, X Elite Gets A Nerf, and the X Product Number Decoder
With the Snapdragon X household now comprised of 4 SKUs, the Snapdragon X Elite identify by itself gained’t do. So Qualcomm is giving all the chips official product numbers. And as that is the primary time Qualcomm has achieved this for PC SoCs, so comes with it the necessity to clarify their product numbering scheme, and decode it.
Using Qualcomm’s flagship chip for instance, now we have the X1E-84-100. With the primary letter referring to the product household (Snapdragon X), the second letter/digit is the era of the product – on this case, the primary era of Snapdragon X. So that is the place we’ll see Qualcomm primarily incrementing their product numbering in future generations, how ever the corporate decides to outline them.
Following that’s the tier. Which right now is Elite (E) or Plus (P).
Finally, now we have the 2 units of digits. The first set is the SKU digits, principally ordering chips by efficiency. And the second set of digits is being reserved by the corporate for now for future use. For all the chip SKUs being launched at this time, every little thing may have the identical -100 suffix, no matter tier or efficiency.
It’s at first blush a really sterile…
