As we mentioned a short while ago, this new processor is actually an ARM SoC designed for Windows-based notebooks. The fruit of collaboration between Microsoft and Qualcomm, it is the brainchild of Nuvia, a company acquired in 2020. Before going into the details of the Snapdragon X Elite‘s announced performance, let’s take a look at the logic behind Qualcomm’s decision to buy a start-up (Nuvia) that had been in existence for less than 2 years and hadn’t really produced anything (at least in concrete terms) for nearly $1.4 billion…
Nuvia, a Dream Team and savings.
Nuvia is clearly a crazy cast of engineers. The company was founded in 2019 by three semiconductor industry veterans. The three have worked their way up from AMD, TI and ARM to Google. Their main feat is to have given birth to the Apple M1 chip. ARM ‘s arrival in the heart of Apple’s systems with a performance that no one had ever imagined. And here’s the second subtlety of this deal, giving birth to the Snapdragon X Elite. Nuvia obviously designs chips using the ARM instruction set, but, as with Apple Silicon, it also designs its own cores. ARM receives two types of remuneration: license payments for the use of its instruction set, and royalties on each chip sold. By using Nuvia cores, Qualcomm could save several million dollars a year (between $128 and $160 million).
Snapdragon X Elite: promising performance (on paper).
At its Snapdragon Summit event, Qualcomm presented several chips, including the Snapdragon X Elite. Produced in 4nm, this chip features 12 Oryon cores running at a frequency of 3.8 GHz. As with its competitors, Qualcomm has played the performance comparison game. A system equipped with this chip is claimed to offer monothread performance superior to that of the Apple M2 Max, while using 30% less energy.
On a slide showing the Geekbench benchmark, the Snapdragon X Elite outperformed 13th gen Intel systems with 10 and 12 cores by up to two times. A little further on, it was the 3D Mark benchmark that allowed the chip to shine, with results 80% higher than a Ryzen 9 7940HS. These few data are objectively astounding, as they are obtained each time with far greater efficiency.
However, we’ll have to wait until the second half of 2024 to really see what this SoC can do. If the promises and announcements are kept, the laptop market could be turned upside down. So it’s easy to see why Intel , AMD and Nvidia are getting busy.
