Qualcomm
Windows-on-Arm is finally just about good enough to serve as your main PC, thanks to a combination of long-awaited Snapdragon X-series silicon from Qualcomm, Arm-specific improvements in the Windows 11 24H2 update, and third-party software developers that are slowly but surely putting out Arm-native versions of their most popular apps.
So far, those Snapdragon X chips have been confined mostly to $1,000-and-up premium PCs like the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop. But Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon has said that he wants to get better hardware into midrange laptops in the $700 range, and today the company took a concrete step toward making that happen: a new version of the Snapdragon X with 8 CPU cores instead of 10, but the same Oryon CPU architecture (a neural processing unit [NPU] that still meets Microsoft’s requirements for Copilot+ PCs) and the same Snapdragon X Plus branding as the faster 10-core versions.
There are two separate versions of the 8-core Snapdragon X Plus. The X1P-46-100 version allows its CPU to boost up to 4.0 GHz for single-core tasks and has a GPU capable of 2.1 TFLOPS of performance (compared to 3.8 for the 10-core X plus, and 4.6 for the fastest Snapdragon X Elite variants). The X1P-42-100 version only boosts up to 3.4 GHz in single-core mode and has a 1.7 TFLOPS GPU. All of Qualcomm’s NPUs are the same, offering 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS).
Qualcomm
The 8-core version of the Snapdragon X Plus hasn’t exactly been a secret; benchmarks of the slower X1P-42-100 variant have already leaked, suggesting that its CPU performance mostly holds up—5 percent slower than the 10-core X Plus in single-core tests, 20 percent slower in multicore tests, but as much as 50 percent slower in games and GPU benchmarks. None of the Snapdragon X chips are capable of high-end gaming, but it looks like these low-end X Plus chips will be poorly suited to anything other than basic 3D rendering.
As for the NPU performance and the Copilot+ label, Microsoft says these PCs will be capable of running more generative AI and machine learning tasks locally rather than using cloud services. There aren’t many Copilot+ features available yet, but there are reasons to like the Copilot+ label even if you hate generative AI and intend to turn off every AI feature you can find a toggle for: Copilot+ PCs also need to have at least 16GB of RAM and 256GB of solid-state storage, making them that much better for web browsing and general-purpose computing.
It’s worth noting that this 8-core X Plus looks like yet another cut-down version of the flagship Snapdragon X Elite silicon; we have yet to see anything from Qualcomm that has been purpose-built to serve the low-end PC market. Historically, Qualcomm has used two separate silicon tiers for its Windows PCs—the high-end Snapdragon 8cx series and the low-end Snapdragon 7c series—and we haven’t seen what an Oryon-based successor to the 7c might look like.
Qualcomm probably doesn’t want to offer cheap alternatives to its flagships too early—why risk cannibalizing sales of higher-end PCs? But if Qualcomm actually intends to ship the volume of Arm PCs it claims it wants to (Amon has said he thinks getting Qualcomm SoCs in 60 percent of all PC shipments is a realistic possibility), it will need to ship more products that serve the low-cost, high-volume PC market. This new 8-core Snapdragon X Plus is a decent fit for a middle-of-the-road PC, but it seems unlikely to hit $500-and-under laptops anytime soon.