What you need to know
- Qualcomm is today launching a more affordable variant of the Snapdragon X Plus SoC for Windows 11 devices.
- The new chip features 8-cores and a less powerful GPU, but maintains the same 45 TOPS NPU found on the higher-end X Elite SoC.
- Snapdragon X Plus with 8-Cores is expected to appear in devices starting at just $799.
Qualcomm is launching a new, lower-tier Snapdragon X SoC today, designed to bring the new generation of Windows 11 on Arm to a more affordable range of devices. The new chip is a variant of the Snapdragon X Plus, which now features 8-cores but with the same 45 TOPS NPU found in the higher-end X Elite SoC.
The company launched its first wave of Snapdragon X chips back in June with the 10-Core Snapdragon X Plus and 12-Core Snapdragon X Elite. Laptops with these chips start at $999, placing them comfortably in the premium laptop category. Now, Qualcomm wants to bring Snapdragon X to even more users looking for laptops in a lower price bracket.
Laptops with the 8-Core Snapdragon X Plus are likely to begin at as low as $800, depending on the rest of the components used, and all the major Windows hardware makers including HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Samsung are on-board to deliver devices with this chip starting as soon as today.
To achieve that lower price point, the 8-Core Snapdragon X Plus SoC features a less powerful GPU and slightly slower CPU clock speed. There are two flavors of the 8-Core X Plus, one with a 1.7 TFLOPS GPU, and a slightly more capable variant with 2.1 TFLOPS GPU (coming in the first half of 2025.) For comparison, the 10-Core Snapdragon X Plus has a GPU that outputs 3.8 TFLOPS.
Qualcomm promises this lower-end chip still delivers great performance, outpacing the Intel Core Ultra 5 125U and AMD Ryzen 8460U in both single-core and multi-core benchmarks. It also trades blows with Apple's M2 Silicon found in the MacBook Air, with better multi-threaded performance and the ability to output to up to three external displays instead of just one.
In our own benchmarking testing on reference hardware, the X Plus with 8-cores puts up a mighty fight. In Geekbench 6, we got a multi-core score of 11446 and single-core score of 2433. In Cinebench 24, we got a score of 686 in the multi-core test, putting it comfortably between the Intel Core Ultra 5 and 7.
The big news is that even the lowest end 8-Core X Plus has the most powerful NPU available in a Qualcomm chip today, outputting 45 TOPS and matching that of the flagship Snapdragon X Elite. This means it's a fully certified Copilot+ PC chip, and will be capable of running all the exclusive Windows AI feature such as Recall, Live Captions, and Image Generation in Photos.
On that subject, Copilot+ is now expanding beyond Qualcomm and Windows on Arm. After enjoying a short exclusivity window over the summer, Microsoft is now expanding Copilot+ features to x86 devices with the Intel Core Ultra 200V and AMD Ryzen AI 300 chips, which are starting to ship in laptops now.
Intel's second-generation Core Ultra chips are a direct response to Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite, beating the Arm chip in several key benchmarks. But while Intel races to compete in the high-end, Qualcomm is turning its attention to more affordable laptops with the Snapdragon X Plus 8-Core. Bringing great performance and efficiency to lower-cost laptops is just as important as competing in the high-end.
The new Snapdragon X Plus is the sort of chip you'd find in a theoretical future Surface Laptop Go, which is Microsoft's affordable Surface laptop line that would benefit greatly from the Arm processor, delivering true all day battery life and great performance.
