Qualcomm unveils Snapdragon X Plus chip for PCs with on-device AI

American semiconductor entity Qualcomm has announced a new chip in its Snapdragon X family for PCs. Named the Snapdragon X Plus, the chip is a trimmed down version of its top-end Snapdragon X Elite. PCs powered by both these chips are expected to launch in the coming months.

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus: Details

The chip features a 10-core Oryon CPU, a custom-integrated processor that the company said delivers up to 37 per cent faster CPU performance and up to 54 per cent less power consumption compared to peers.

Like the top-end Snapdragon X Elite platform, the chip has a dedicated Qualcomm Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for on-device artificial intelligence capabilities. Qualcomm said the NPU on the Snapdragon X Plus is capable of 45 trillions of operations-per-second (TOPS). According to Qualcomm, its Hexagon NPU is the world’s fastest NPU for laptops.

“Snapdragon X Series platforms deliver leading experiences and are positioned to revolutionise the PC industry. Snapdragon X Plus will power AI-Supercharged PCs that enable even more users to excel as radical new AI experiences emerge in this period of rapid development and deployment,” said senior vice president of compute and gaming at Qualcomm, Kedar Kondap. “By delivering leading CPU performance, AI capabilities, and power efficiency, we are once again pushing the boundaries of what is possible in mobile computing,” he added.

To demonstrate the chip’s NPU performance, Qualcomm previewed select AI-powered apps on PC based on the Hexagon NPU. The company demonstrated code generation in “Visual Studio Code” from Codegen that is a program designed to assist developers by generating new lines of codes in real time with on-device generative AI. Other features previewed by the company to demonstrate chip’s performance were Music generation from text prompts in Audacity and automatic language translation into live captions in OBS Studio.

Qualcomm said the PC’s powered by the Snapdragon X Plus and Snapdragon X Elite chipsets are expected to launch in mid-2024. However, the company did not specify any brands that are working on devices powered by the new Snapdragon X-series chips.