At this year’s Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm released its most formidable PC processor yet. The Snapdragon X Elite, which is designed to run Windows, will provide real competition to AMD and Intel for notebook PCs.

This newest Snapdragon will breathe fire, with 12 high-performance custom Arm-compatible CPUs that can run up to 4.3 GHz (although not all at once).

Qualcomm also loaded the monolithic chip with a new high-performance Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU). The Hexagon processor is capable of up to 45 TOPS of INT8 AI performance and can run large language models (LLMs) for generative AI applications. Together, the CPU, GPU and NPU—which Qualcomm refers to as the AI Engine—are capable of 75 TOPS of INT8 AI performance.

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite

For Qualcomm, its partnership with Microsoft has been a strategic market extension of its traditional smartphone and mobile business.

Qualcomm has supplied derivative smartphone processors for Windows on Arm-based PCs in partnership with Microsoft starting with the Snapdragon 835 in 2017, as part of the Always Connected PC (ACPC) project. After a couple of generations of delivering Snapdragon mobile-derived processors, Qualcomm and Microsoft started to customize Snapdragon processors just for notebooks with the Snapdragon 8cx processor.

GenAI on device

The overall theme of the Summit focused on on-device AI, especially on-device generative AI. Qualcomm claims it can run models up to 13 billion parameters on the Snapdragon X Elite. The company ran multiple demos showing genAI applications, including 7B model Llama2, a Stable Diffusion example executing in under 1 second, and a picture expansion that could create an image that was twice as large as the original (adding AI created content around the original image).

The key to Snapdragon X Elite’s AI performance is the Hexagon NPU with its 45 TOPS of performance at INT8 precision. By comparison, Apple’s M2 Pro and M2 Max chips with Apple’s 16-core Neural Engine is capable of 15.8 TOPS. Qualcomm’s Hexagon NPU was improved by allocating twice the shared memory and a 2.5× faster Tensor architecture for transformer neural networks. Since Qualcomm first introduced the NPU function in its Snapdragon 835 in 2017, the company has seen a 100× increase in AI processing power. Qualcomm claims Hexagon now has 4.5× faster total AI processing power than its competitors.

The chip also includes an updated Micro NPU inside an ultra-low power Qualcomm Sensing Hub. The sensing hub can run continuously to be used for login and can wake the device when in sleep mode.

In a video interview, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talked about how the next generation of computer interfaces will use the reasoning power of its CoPilot AI to replace the start button and offer a more personalized and natural PC experience.

Oryon is the star

Oryon (pronounced like Orion) is the name of the custom Arm-compatible CPU core designed by Qualcomm. These cores are different from the Arm cores that the company uses in the Snapdragon processors for Android phones. The genesis of the Oryon CPU is from a company called Nuvia that Qualcomm bought in early 2021. The original Nuvia custom Arm-compatible CPU cores targeted low-power server processors using an architectural license from Arm.

Since the acquisition, the Nuvia design has been modified for mobile notebooks. The acquisition of Nuvia also sparked a legal dispute between Qualcomm and Arm over licensing, with Arm claiming the original Nuvia license wasn’t transferable to Qualcomm and Qualcomm arguing it already had the proper licenses. The issue is ongoing but isn’t scheduled to go to court until after the initial Snapdragon X Elite products are in the market.

On Snapdragon X Elite, all 12 Oryon CPUs are high-performance cores, which runs counter to most contemporary mobile processors. Most high core count mobile processors mix performance cores with lower-power efficiency cores. Qualcomm said its Oryon core has enough range that it can be efficient without requiring a different core design for lower power.

Oryon’s 12 CPUs are grouped into three clusters of four cores, each with 12 MB of L2 cache. The cores are compliant with the ArmV8.7 instruction set. Microarchitecture details of the Oryon core haven’t been released, but it’s expected that Qualcomm will release more details as it gets closer to product launch.

All the Oryon cores can run up to 3.8 GHz, but one or two cores can be boosted to 4.3 GHz when the other cores are shut down. The boost mode is useful for launching applications, web browsing, and for a snappier UI experience, while all 12 cores can be useful for video transcoding, game playing and AI processing.

Qualcomm’s Kedar Kondap presents the features of the Snapdragon X Elite

Qualcomm showed performance charts that had the Snapdragon X Elite beating AMD, Intel, and Apple’s M2 chips in single and multi-threaded benchmarks. Qualcomm used various synthetic and application workload benchmarks to show significant performance and power efficiency advantages over some of the best processors the other companies have to offer. The caveat is that the Snapdragon X Elite processor won’t be available in systems until mid-2024. At that time, AMD, Apple and Intel will all have newer chips to benchmark against.

In his keynote for the event, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said that the Oryon CPU will make its way into smartphones, cars, XR devices and other platforms in the future.

The Snapdragon Elite X also offers a significant improvement in graphics processing performance compared with its predecessor. The GPU has 4.6 TFLOPS of raw compute power. For the internal display, it supports 4K at 120 Hz refresh and the HDR10 color range of 1 billion colors. In total, the GPU can drive three UHD HDR10 displays at 60 Hz.

Feeding the Oryon CPUs, the Adreno GPU and the Hexagon NPU are a unified memory interface with LPDDR5X DRAM offering 136 GB/s of shared memory bandwidth.

Laptops coming in 2024

The Snapdragon X Elite will be available in multiple form factors from full-sized laptops to ultrathin convertible notebooks starting in mid-2024. While Qualcomm hasn’t released power or thermal design numbers, it should be scalable from large notebooks down to lightweight, fanless designs. Qualcomm reference designs have ranged from 12 W to over 45 W. OEMs planning on introducing devices based on the Snapdragon X Elite inlude Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Honor, Lenovo, Microsoft Surface, Samsung and Xiaomi.

By: DocMemory
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