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MagyarSnapdragon X Elite: Qualcomm presents three variants of flagship Arm-based laptop chip
Qualcomm recently showed off the Snapdragon X Elite’s prowess against its Intel, AMD and Apple counterparts. While convincing, the benchmarks only painted a partial picture of the silicon. Now, the Snapdragon X Elite has been officially launched, and it’s a lot more confusing than initially anticipated. It is a 4 nm chip and will debut alongside laptops from major OEMs like Lenovo and Microsoft later this year. As of now, there are three Snapdragon X Elite variants, the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-84-100, X1E-80-100, and X1E-78-100.
Qualcomm’s explanation for its naming scheme doesn’t help break down how each variant differs from one another. The X1E denotes the generation and type of chip (first-gen, Elite). 84 and 100 represent the SKU (higher is better) and variant, respectively. Back when Qualcomm showed off the Snapdragon X Elite last year, there were two designs with TDP of 23 Watts and 80 Watts. Whether or not they’re still around (or affect the SKU number in any way) is unknown, as Qualcomm doesn’t mention either Snapdragon X Elite variant’s TDP.
The fundamental difference between the three Snapdragon X Elite versions lies within their clocks and GPU. The X1E-84-100 offers the best dual-core (4.2 GHz) and multi-threaded (3.8 GHz) clocks, along with a 4.6 TFLOPS GPU. The X1E-80-100 scales it down to 3.4 GHz (multi-threaded), 4.0 GHz (dual-core boost) and a 3.8 TFLOPS GPU. Lastly, the X1E-78-100 cuts dual-core boost altogether while keeping the same multi-threaded clocks and GPU as the “80” variant.
Specs-wise, the Snapdragon X Elite packs a 12-core CPU (8+4), a 45 TOPS Hexagon NPU, Spectra ISP (dual 18-bit, 4K HDR video), and a slightly different Adreno GPU depending on the SKU. Interestingly, memory is limited to 64 GB of LPDDR5x 8,448 RAM. While that might seem high for normal use, Qualcomm advertises the chip for AI applications, many of which are memory-hungry. Laptops powered by the Snapdragon X Elite can pick between UFS 4.0, PCIe Gen4 and SD v3.0 storage.
Connectivity options on the Snapdragon X Elite include USB 4.0, Bluetooth 5.4, Wi-Fi 7, Wi-Fi 6E, and 5G. Feature availability might differ because the wireless radios are not baked into the SoC and interface with it via an M.2 PCIe Gen3 slot. The GPU can power one 4K 120 Hz display natively or three 5K 60 Hz units externally.
Source(s)
Qualcomm
