Qualcomm has an 8-core Snapdragon X Plus to bring Windows on Arm to lower price points

Summary

• The new Snapdragon X Plus 8-core chipset offers high performance at lower prices.
• Snapdragon X Plus 8-core outperforms competitors by 61% while using 179% less power.
• Qualcomm's new chipset lineup includes SKUs with boosted cores and maintained NPU performance.

Qualcomm is once again expanding its Snapdragon X series of chipsets for Windows laptops, introducing the Snapdragon X Plus 8-core. This is the Snapdragon X SoC that I've been reporting on since January, but branded differently than was planned back then. The idea is to hit lower price points for high-performing Windows on Arm PCs.

You might recall that Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said in a Q&A session that Snapdragon laptops would start at around $600. Now, we can see the final piece of that puzzle.

"The first and best Copilot+ PCs are powered by Snapdragon X Series platforms, launching a new generation in personal computing, made possible by our groundbreaking NPU," said Cristiano Amon, President and Chief Executive Officer, Qualcomm Incorporated. "With Snapdragon X Plus 8-core, we are now bringing to more users these transformative AI experiences, and the best-in-class performance and unprecedented battery life of our power efficient custom Qualcomm Oryon CPU. We’re proud to be working with leading global OEMs and retail partners to expand our portfolio and enable enterprise customers and consumers."

Snapdragon X Plus looks surprisingly good

There are a total of four SKUs

Qualcomm says that the Snapdragon X Plus 8-core gets 61% better performance than its competitor, while the competing chip uses 179% more power. The interesting thing is that the competitor that Qualcomm is talking about is the Core Ultra 7 155U, rather than some lesser-tier budget CPU. It's promising 79% better CPU performance than a Core Ultra 5 125U.

There are two SKUs of the Snapdragon X Plus 8-core, while there are now two SKUs of the now-rebranded Snapdragon X Plus 10-core. It's quick to rebrand what was previously just known as Snapdragon X Plus, but remember, this wasn't always going to be called Snapdragon X Plus 8-core.

Aside from the core count, there are some key differences. These new SKUs have a single boost core, something that used to be exclusive to higher-end Snapdragon X Elite chips. The Snapdragon X Plus X1P-46-100 actually gets better single-core benchmark scores than the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100.

However, the Snapdragon X Plus 8-core has a much less powerful Adreno GPU than the ones we've seen on higher-end SKUs. In other words, it has much of the CPU power, but not nearly as much of the GPU power.

Qualcomm did maintain NPU performance across the stack, coming in at 45 TOPS. That means that all of these laptops are going to support Copilot+, assuming they also come with 16GB RAM and 256GB storage.

Products are launching today

We're so used to seeing some new Qualcomm PC chipset launch and having to wait months (or even over a year) for it to show up in products. This time, the company has nailed the Intel approach. Alongside its launch today, an array of hardware vendors are announcing laptops using the new chip.

You'll see more in the coming days, but the official partner list is Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Asus, and Samsung.