By Joanna Nelius , laptop reviewer. She has covered consumer technology, with an emphasis on PC gaming, since 2018. Previous bylines: USA Today, Gi

Qualcomm strong-arms its way into Windows laptops this summer

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2024-04-24 13:30:09

By Joanna Nelius , laptop reviewer. She has covered consumer technology, with an emphasis on PC gaming, since 2018. Previous bylines: USA Today, Gizmodo, PC Gamer, Maximum PC, among others.

On Wednesday, Qualcomm announced the impending arrival of its Snapdragon X Plus laptop processor alongside more information for its previously announced Snapdragon X Elite chips. While this is not the first time we’ve seen Qualcomm processors in a laptop, it’s the first time the company could have a chip that rivals Apple, Intel, and AMD on speed.

The Snapdragon X Plus is Qualcomm’s entry-level laptop chip. It has 10 cores, 42MB of cache, a maximum multithreaded frequency of 3.4GHz, and an NPU with 45 tera operations per second (TOPS, or how many mathematical calculations it can solve in a second) to assist with fancy-smancy generative AI applications. But keep in mind, TOPS is an arbitrary measurement that can sound more impressive than it is because it doesn’t necessarily take into account the type or quality of those calculations.

The Snapdragon X Plus also supports LPDDR5x memory at a maximum transfer rate of 8448 MT/s and has a 3.8 teraflop (TFLOP) integrated Adreno GPU. (TFLOP is also a mathematical measurement; it’s shorthand for how many trillion floating-point operations it can calculate per second. It’s also an arbitrary measurement, but it sure sounds impressive!)