The curtains are drawn and it’s nearly showtime for Qualcomm and its Snapdragon X SoC workforce. After first detailing the SoC practically Eight months in the past on the firm’s most up-to-date Snapdragon Summit, and making quite a few efficiency disclosures within the intervening months, the Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus launch is sort of upon us. The chips have already shipped to Qualcomm’s laptop computer companions, and the primary laptops are set to ship subsequent week.
In the final Eight months Qualcomm has made a variety of fascinating claims for his or her high-performance Windows-on-Arm SoC – lots of which might be put to the take a look at within the coming weeks. But past all of the efficiency claims and bluster amidst what’s shaping as much as be a extremely aggressive atmosphere for PC CPUs, there’s an much more elementary query concerning the Snapdragon X that we’ve been dying to get to: how does it work?
Ahead of subsequent week’s launch, then, we’re lastly getting the reply to that, as at this time Qualcomm is releasing their long-awaited architectural disclosure on the Snapdragon X SoC. This contains not solely their new, {custom} Arm v8 “Oryon” CPU core, but in addition technical disclosures on their Adreno GPU, and the Hexagon NPU that backs their heavily-promoted AI capabilities. The firm has made it clear up to now that the Snapdragon X is a critical, top-priority effort for the corporate – that they’re not simply slapping collectively a Windows SoC from their present IP blocks and calling it a day – so there’s an excessive amount of novel know-how inside the SoC.
And whereas we’re excited to have a look at all of it, we’ll even be the primary to confess that we’re essentially the most excited to lastly get to take a deep dive on Oryon, Qualcomm’s custom-built Arm CPU cores. The first new high-performance CPU design created from scratch within the final a number of years, the importance of Oryon can’t be overstated. Besides offering the idea of a brand new era of Windows-on-Arm SoCs that Qualcomm hopes will vault them into competition within the Windows PC market, Oryon may even be the idea of Qualcomm’s conventional Snapdragon cell handset and pill SoCs going ahead.
So an excessive amount of the corporate’s {hardware} over the following few years is driving on this CPU structure – and if all goes based on plan, there might be many extra generations of Oryon to observe. One means or one other, it’s going to set Qualcomm aside from its opponents in each the PC and cell areas, because it means Qualcomm is shifting on from Arm’s reference designs, which by their very nature are accessible Qualcomm’s competitors as properly.
So with out additional ado, let’s dive in to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X SoC structure.
Setting The Stage: Elite, Plus, & Currently Announced SKUs
As a fast refresher, Qualcomm has introduced 4 Snapdragon X SKUs up to now, all of which have been made accessible to gadget producers for subsequent week’s launch.
| Qualcomm Snapdragon X (Gen 1) Processors | |||||||
| AnandTech | CPU Cores | All Core Max Turbo | Two Core Max Turbo | GPU TFLOPS | NPU TOPS | Total Cache (MB) |
Memory |
| Snapdragon X Elite | |||||||
| X1E-84-100 | 12 | 3.Eight GHz | 4.2 GHz | 4.6 | 45 | 42 | LPDDR5X-8448 |
| X1E-80-100 | 12 | 3.Four GHz | 4.zero GHz | 3.8 | 45 | 42 | LPDDR5X-8448 |
| X1E-78-100 | 12 | 3.Four GHz | 3.Four GHz | 3.8 | 45 | 42 | LPDDR5X-8448 |
| Snapdragon X Plus | |||||||
| X1P-64-100 | 10 | 3.Four GHz | 3.Four GHz | 3.8 | 45 | 42 | LPDDR5X-8448 |
Three of those are “Elite” SKUs, that are outlined by their inclusion of 12 CPU cores. Meanwhile Qualcomm is providing a single “Plus” SKU (up to now), which cuts that all the way down to 10 CPU cores.
Officially, Qualcomm isn’t assigning any TDP scores to those chip SKUs, as, in precept, any given SKU can be utilized throughout the complete spectrum of energy ranges….
