Snapdragon X Plus: Qualcomm says its slowest CPU still beats Intel

Laptops using Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon chips have yet to ship. But PC makers — and you — will now have another option: the Snapdragon X Plus.

Think of the Snapdragon X Plus as Qualcomm’s version of the Intel Core i5: It’s based on the same design as the Snapdragon X Elite, the Arm PC processor that Qualcomm has been talking about since last fall. But it’s stripped down, with fewer cores, and without the “turbo” characteristics of its more powerful sibling. On the other hand, Qualcomm still believes that it will compete with and surpass Intel’s latest processors.

Qualcomm began talking about the Snapdragon X Elite last fall, and has since made waves with a pretty open quasi-testing process where journalists have been able to monitor benchmarks Qualcomm employees have run, along with hands-on gaming opportunities. At the beginning of the month, Qualcomm began comparing the Snapdragon X Elite to the latest Core Ultra processors, and let me have a turn playing the PC games Control and Redout 2. Both games ran above 30fps at 1900×1200 resolution and Low settings.

Now the company is taking Snapdragon performance down a notch… or is it? Qualcomm is claiming that the Snapdragon X Plus will still outperform the Core Ultra 7 155H at the same power levels by a whopping 28 percent in the latest multithreaded Cinebench benchmark, Cinebench 2024. And it’s 10 percent faster than the Apple M3, too.

Qualcomm

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus: What is it?

In the words of Nitin Kumar, senior director of product management, Qualcomm is aiming the X Plus toward a “broader range of devices.”

Qualcomm’s chip designs aren’t overly complex. The 4nm Snapdragon X Elite includes 12 single-threaded Oryon CPU cores, with two cores able to boost to 4.3GHz from the base speed of 3.8GHz. (Qualcomm plans to further subdivide the Snapdragon X Elite by adjusting the boost clock speed.)

The Plus is similar. It, too, is fabricated at 4nm. But it has 10 single-threaded Oryon cores, not 12, all of which run at a slower 3.4GHz, alongside the same 42MB of cache. There is no turbo option available. Inside is the same Adreno GPU core as the Snapdragon X Elite. And it has the same AI NPU, too, running at the same 45 TOPS as its larger sibling.

Qualcomm

Qualcomm will offer just one Snapdragon X Plus chip, at least for now, using its new, complex naming scheme: the Snapdragon X Plus X1P-64-100.

“As experiences evolve, as there are more use cases that are going to play a more prominent role in these next-gen PCs, we want to offer consumers the same AI experiences across both the Elite and the Plus, Kedar Kondap, the senior vice president and general manager of Compute and Gaming for Qualcomm, told me in a video interview. You can dive deeper into the Snapdragon X Elite and Plus in our exclusive video below.

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus: How fast is it?

Since the Plus shares many of the same characteristics as the Snapdragon X Elite, some of the points of comparison to competing chips — such as the NPU TOPS are redundant. However, Qualcomm shared how the X Plus compares on both the Geekbench and Cinebench 2024 platforms. Those are two of leading synthesized benchmarks used to compare CPU performance, so their inclusion is significant.

And while PCWorld doesn’t care as much about how the X Elite and X Plus shape up to Apple’s best, it’s worth mentioning. The X Elite is 28 percent faster (15,610) and the X Plus is 10 percent faster (13,350) on the Geekbench v6.2.0 benchmark, compared to the Apple M3 inside a MacBook Pro (12,154).

Otherwise, Qualcomm provided this comparison slide.

Qualcomm

Remember, Qualcomm began with its Snapdragon 8cx series for phones and PCs, and eventually broke it out into sub-categories like the 7 series, too. If Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus are as popular as they seem to be, it’s possible we’ll see new derivatives in the future, too.

The first laptops with the Snapdragon X Elite chips inside are expected by midyear. We’re hoping to see some at Computex in Taiwan in early June.