Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said at the San Diego company's earnings conference** that the Snapdragon X Elite is closer to an official launch, with the company's new chipset tailored for Windows laptops and coming in mid-2024. This basically means that Apple and its M-series custom chips will have a new competitor to worry about, and we've seen some impressive performance numbers based on previous benchmarks.
Compared to the Snapdragon 8CX Gen 3, the Snapdragon X Elite offers a huge leap in performance, making it a formidable rival to Apple's M3 series. The flagship chipset will be available in mid-2024, just in time for the back-to-school season, and Qualcomm will target consumers who not only want a computer with more computing power and longer battery life, just like Apple's silicon Macbook, that doesn't require a power brick for lectures or lessons.
The Snapdragon X Elite also appears to have been developed for the next version of Windows, which is said to support several AI features. While many of Qualcomm's partners are likely to launch laptops running Windows 11, future-proofing by providing a direct update path to Windows 12 is a smart move for the chipset maker. According to previous benchmarks, the Snapdragon X Elite is 21% faster than the M3 in multi-core performance and can operate at two different power limits; 23w and 80w.
These improvements, combined with the efficiency of the Snapdragon X Elite, should eventually create some competition in an area where Apple largely dominates. Microsoft's Windows is still the most popular desktop operating system in the world right now, and Qualcomm has a chance to capture a sizable piece of the market. Of course, as Apple becomes more and more software in control of macOS, it will be interesting to see how consumers react to the upcoming releases.