MAUI, Hawaii—At the opening keynote of the 2023 Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm representatives broke out the speeds and feeds in force and detailed the first SoC in the company's Snapdragon X Elite line, powered by its much-anticipated next-gen CPU core, code-named "Oryon." Teased earlier in the month, “Snapdragon X” is the branding for Qualcomm’s newest SoCs for PC compute, and the Snapdragon Elite X is the first issue, positioned as its premium solution. Outfitted for AI local processing and packing a host of efficiency-minded innovations, the Snapdragon X Elite built on Oryon is, according to Qualcomm, the punchiest processor for laptops that it has ever produced.
Indeed, it’s the subject of a lot of impressive (you might even say, gaudy) claims around its conventional compute performance, its AI inferencing aptitude, and the overall power efficiency. Snapdragon claims that the Oryon chip will be scalable across a wide range of laptop form factors: thin ultraportables, flexible 2-in-1s, even large-screen power machines. So, how did Qualcomm get here?
(Credit: Qualcomm)First, a Bit of Snapdragon Compute Background
Qualcomm, of course, is very well known for its chips and supporting components that go into modern smartphones. It's much less well known for its CPU efforts in PC laptops to date.
The broader "Snapdragon X" is the follow-on to the company’s Snapdragon 8cx, an Arm-based CPU line that appeared in a smattering of laptops over the last few years. The 8cx designs also showed up, in rebranded form, as the SQ1, SQ2, and SQ3 in a subset of Microsoft’s Surface Pro detachable 2-in-1s, most recently the Microsoft Surface Pro 9 (SQ3).
The SQ3-based Microsoft Surface Pro 9 (Credit: Joseph Maldonado)The 8cx has appeared in three generations: the original 8cx (2018), the 8cx Gen 2 (2020), and the 8cx Gen 3 (2021), and was Qualcomm’s first purpose-built line of SoCs for laptop computers. (Earlier appearances of Snapdragon on PCs were higher-TDP implementations of the company’s smartphone processors.)
Despite 8cx chips posting some impressive numbers in isolated benchmark tests (mainly of battery life, including some of PCMag’s own), performance has generally been underwhelming, and the number of design wins tiny relative to the broad adoption of classic Intel Core and AMD Ryzen mobile processors. Also, the 8cx chips’ Arm design and non-x86 nature have led to some issues with broad software compatibility compared with classic x86 designs. That has limited 8cx’s wider appeal.
The 8cx chips were built around a CPU core that Qualcomm dubbed Kryo. Oryon is a newer CPU core that will power the conventional compute in Snapdragon X Elite. It was announced at 2022's Snapdragon Summit and will underpin future Qualcomm initiatives in areas including laptop, mobile phone, automotive, and mixed reality experiences. It's a custom core (rather than a licensed-from-Arm core) and a product, in part, of the company's 2021 acquisition of Nuvia, a server-silicon startup founded by a group of senior Apple execs involved in the development of Apple Silicon—today's most successful Arm-based processor platform for laptops.
We expect to see Snapdragon X Elite and Oryon in action later in the Snapdragon Summit, integrated into partner laptops onsite. For now, let’s break down the specs and surrounding details that Qualcomm has shared so far.
Oryon at the Core
Oryon (pronounced like “Orion,” the star system) in its initial offering is a 12-core Arm CPU core, custom-designed by Qualcomm, built on 64-bit architecture and 4nm process technology. It’s the successor to the Kryo used in Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (5nm process) and earlier 8cx efforts.
(Credit: Qualcomm)The overall boost clock on these 12 cores is 3.8GHz, with the ability (a bit like Intel chips with their various Turbo Boost and Turbo Boost Max technologies) to boost just one or two cores to 4.3GHz. According to Qualcomm, this limited acceleration should manifest in faster application launch times, better web browsing responsiveness, and snappier UI. The company also points out that, when in boost mode, these cores are the world’s first 4GHz-capable Arm cores.
(Credit: Qualcomm)The cores on this initial Oryon effort are clustered into three sets of four. All of them are designated as high-performance cores, in contrast to the “hybrid design” (Intel’s term) of Intel’s recent-generation Core desktop and mobile processors, most of which are divided into banks of Performance and Efficient cores (P-cores and E-cores).
That’s also an interesting departure from Kryo, which employed both high-power and low-power core types in the 8cx’s Kryo CPU portion. We’ll inquire during the summit for the reasoning behind the choice not to employ any low-power cores in this first design.
Adreno: The Graphics Differences
We’ve seen Adreno GPU cores many times before, but some changes are coming to the on-chip graphics with Elite X, versus the Adreno implementations on earlier Snapdragon compute platforms. The Adreno GPU on the die is rated for up to 4.6 TFLOPs. It supports DirectX 12 and is the first Snapdragon PC-compute GPU that supports upgradable graphics drivers.
The GPU really has the potential to hit its stride, though, for multi-display functionality via its display processing unit (DPU). Adreno will be able to power an internal laptop display up to 4K (UHD) at 120Hz, and it will be possible for OEMs to support video output to up to two 5K external panels at up to 60Hz, or up to three UHD monitors at 60Hz from the integrated graphics. HDR 10 is on tap for all of these display schemes.
(Credit: Qualcomm)The multi-display flexibility may turn out to be a key differentiator for some users, especially when looked at versus early Apple M1 and M2 laptop models that natively support only one external display. Of course, this is all just potential; it's all down to the choices the OEMs make in specific models.
Also incorporated is AVI encode/decode for 4K video streaming with HDR. A separate video processing unit (VPU) supports hardware AVI, H.264, and H.265 encode at 4K/60Hz and decode at 4K/120Hz.
Hexagon and More: Big NPU, Baby NPU
Any recent mobile processor worth its salt announced in 2023 is now touting some kind of integrated neural processing unit (NPU), dedicated silicon for processing the large data sets associated with AI workloads. (See: Intel’s “Meteor Lake” laptop chips, coming in December, and AMD’s recent Phoenix mobile processors with Ryzen AI.) The Elite X employs Qualcomm’s own Hexagon NPU, which in earlier times was better classed as a digital signal processor (DSP). In mobile designs, this kind of DSP would often be allocated side jobs like image processing to keep workloads off the hungrier CPU; now, AI and machine-learning workloads are in its purview.
The NPU has its own dedicated power channel and a much faster (2.5x) tensor accelerator than previous efforts, according to Qualcomm. The company claims exponential increases, in this regard, versus competing AI solutions in current PC laptops. For one, we’re intrigued to get to the bottom of this particular 100x claim…
(Credit: Qualcomm)The Hexagon silicon is rated for 45 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) under INT4. In addition, according to the company, the NPU is capable of handling large language models (LLMs) up to 13B parameters. (LLMs with 7B parameters are also supported. With those smaller models, 30-token-per-second processing is possible.) The engine also supports Microsoft’s Windows Studio Effects, a set of video-conferencing enhancements for camera-image auto-framing and background tweaking that we saw demoed recently in our time at the launch of the Surface Laptop Studio 2.
(Credit: Qualcomm)Accompanying the Hexagon NPU is what the company dubs a “micro NPU,” part of the Qualcomm Sensing Hub. This element serves a different purpose than running AI data sets; it works in concert with what the company calls an Always-Sensing ISP (image signal processor) to enhance the operations of the camera, under an umbrella of technologies the company dubs Snapdragon Sight.
The Surrounding Platform and Connectivity
As noted up top, Qualcomm says that Snapdragon X is designed to be power-scalable for laptops in a host of sizes and usage profiles. That means it’ll also need some flexibility in the supporting components around it.
Main memory is now LPDDR5x, supporting 136GB per second of memory bandwidth. Capacities to 64GB will be supported on the platform at the discretion of the OEM. The LPDDR5x is backed by 42MB of total cache.
(Credit: Qualcomm)Qualcomm notes that the platform will support NVMe SSDs up to PCI Express Gen 4. For lower-cost flash-memory implementations, the smartphone-style UFS 4.0 standard is also supported.
This being a Qualcomm processor, with the company’s pedigree, you’d expect leading-edge connectivity aspects to the platform, and Elite X holds to that. Wi-Fi 7 support is on the menu, as well as, of course, 5G in select SKUs as implemented, what you’d expect from a company that pioneered the earliest implementations of 5G in a laptop. Qualcomm cites a Snapdragon X65 5G modem with up to 10Gbps download and 3.5Gbps upload speeds.
As for physical connectivity, the platform supports three USB Type-C ports up to the USB4 variety.
Now, As for Those Performance Claims...
Qualcomm is making some bold claims around Snapdragon Elite X and Oryon, starting with what the company dubs “best in class” multi-threaded (MT) CPU performance. It offered up a performance comparison of its own, sourced from Geekbench 6.1, showing up to 2x MT performance, with the X Elite platform able to hit the peak performance of what Qualcomm posits is a 12-core competitor chip at a third of the power consumption. The company also served up a similar comparison on Geekbench showing 60% better performance than a 14-core competitor (the latter presumably using a mix of P and E cores).
(Credit: Qualcomm) (Credit: Qualcomm)Intriguingly, Qualcomm also put forth a claim around 50% better performance than an Arm-based competitor. We would assume this is Apple and its vanilla M2, but we’ll have to see in our own trials; the company did not indicate the specific chip nor the testing in question.
(Credit: Qualcomm)The Adreno GPU may be even more surprising. In running the 3DMark Wild Life Extreme benchmark, Qualcomm claims the Snapdragon X Elite’s onboard Adreno can hit up to 2x the performance or up to 80% more GPU performance (two different competitors) at drastically lower power consumption levels, or hit the performance levels of those two competitors at far lower power consumption.
(Credit: Qualcomm) (Credit: Qualcomm)All of this, of course, will have to be substantiated by independent benchmarks. But as further sweeteners, CEO Cristiano Amon also put forth, in the course of the keynote, a couple of other selected claims that piqued our interest:
That the Elite X will outrun the Apple Silicon-based M2 Max in single-threaded performance, as well as match the top performance of a "competitor" CPU at 30% less power consumption.
That the Elite X will top the Core i9-13980HX in single-threaded performance and match competitor peak performance at 70% less power consumption
The latter is especially intriguing, as the Core i9-13980HX is part of Intel's performance-processor H family of Core CPUs, as opposed to the more mid-road P series or ultralight-oriented U series. (We wouldn't expect the 12-core Elite X to best the 24-core Core i9-13980HX, with its eight P-cores and 16 E-cores, in a multi-threaded drag race.)
When Can I Get Me One, and From Which PC Makers?
We’ll be seeking to answer those questions in the coming days, but Qualcomm notes that we won't see Snapdragon X Elite-based laptops on the market from its partners until the middle of 2024.
Several PC partners should be onsite showing off their early Snapdragon X Elite designs. The big question: With Snapdragon Elite X out in 2024, as opposed to 2023, can it chisel out any market space, as good as it may look right now, in the face of Intel's imminent Meteor Lake laptop processors, and a likely Apple M3?
(Note: PCMag is attending Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit by invitation, but in keeping with our ethics policy, we have assumed all costs for travel and lodging for the conference.)
