Qualcomm Takes Massive Leap With New Snapdragon X2 Plus SoCs – Delivering the World’s Fastest Laptop NPU In 10 & 6 Core Models

Qualcomm has unveiled its Snapdragon X2 Plus chip at this year's CES, and by the looks of it, the Windows on ARM (WoA) platform has become significantly more powerful.

Qualcomm's New Snapdragon X2 Plus Chips Provide a Tough Competition to AMD's Strix Point & Intel's Lunar Lake

The latest iteration of Qualcomm's Snapdragon Plus chip marks the company's efforts to make WoA devices accessible to consumers by offering top-tier specifications and performance.

The San Diego chipmaker unveiled their latest Snapdragon X2 Plus at CES, showcasing two different variants: a 10-core version (X2P-64-100) and a 6-core version (X2P-42-100). Both chips are based on a 3nm process node like the rest of the X2 family.

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The Snapdragon X2 Plus CPUs retain the same X2-45 Adreno GPU, and feature up to 128 GB LPDDR5x memory capacities with up to 9523 MT/s speeds across a 128-bit bus for up to 152 GB/s bandwidth.

More importantly, Qualcomm claims that the newer chips offer the world's fastest NPU platform on laptops with up to 80 TOPS of AI compute, taking edge AI workloads to a new level. Here is a rundown on specifications:

Specification	Snapdragon X2 Plus (10-core)	Snapdragon X2 Plus (6-core)
CPU Part Number	X2P-64-100	X2P-42-100
CPU Cores	10	6
Total Cache	34 MB	22 MB
Max Multithread Frequency	4.0 GHz	4.0 GHz
GPU Part Number	X2-45	X2-45
GPU Frequency	1.7 GHz	0.9 GHz
NPU Performance	80 TOPS	80 TOPS
Memory Type	LPDDR5x	LPDDR5x
Memory Transfer Rate	9523 MT/s	9523 MT/s

The major performance gains have been achieved through Qualcomm's 3rd-generation Oryon CPU cores, along with the enhanced Hexagon NPU, which yields an incremental performance improvement over the previous generation. According to performance statistics shared by Qualcomm, you are looking at 35% higher single-core performance and 78% higher NPU performance compared to the Snapdragon X Plus series, all while maintaining 43% lower power requirements.

The chips are targeted towards Microsoft's newer generation of Copilot+ PCs, which is why dominating power efficiency was a primary objective with the newer Snapdragon X2 Plus SoCs. Qualcomm has also compared the 10-core variant with AMD's 'Strix Point' Ryzen AI 7 350, which features 28% higher peak performance. When stacked up against Intel's 'Lunar Lake' Core Ultra 7 265U, the Snapdragon X2 Plus delivers 3.5 times higher performance at the same ISO power.

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The new Hexagon NPU places the X2 Plus chips ahead in benchmarking environments, such as the UL Procyon AI CV Score and Geekbench AI, surpassing AMD's Strix Point and Lunar Lake equivalents by up to 6.4 times. One of the major improvements showcased by Qualcomm with the Snapdragon X2 Plus platform is 'multi-day' battery life, although the chipmaker didn't disclose official figures.

For the new Adreno GPU, Qualcomm claims up to a 29% performance uplift versus the previous gen while enabling support for the latest APIs and graphics innovations such as DX12 Ultimate, Vulkan 1.4, OpenCL 3.0, Adreno High Performance Memory (HPM), and further ray tracing improvements.

It is exciting to see Qualcomm advancing with its laptop SoCs, given that the company is currently the only option in the WoA segment, and it still manages to rival mainstream offerings from AMD and Intel. The Snapdragon X2 Plus SoCs are a step in the right direction when you factor in performance-per-watt figures, alongside the gigantic bump in edge AI performance.

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