Qualcomm recaptured the public’s attention in the PC market with its new Snapdragon X Elite chipset aimed at competing with the MacBooks of the world, but now the silicon provider is looking to grab a larger share of the market with a lower powered chip.
Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Plus system on a chip (SoC), will be powering a wave of new Windows enabled PCs starting at $899.
Among the first PC partners to house the new 8-core Snapdragon X Plus will be Asus with the Zenbook S 15 and Dell with its Inspiron 14.
Qualcomm has earmarked the performance of its new Snapdragon X Plus SoC as being roughly 80 percent of its more powerful flagship X Elite chipset. Be it the X Plus boasts about the same CPU performance as the 10 or 12-core X Elite, it’s the drop off in GPU as well as the reduced cache footprint.
While these new X Plus chips have the same 45 TOPs present to power the same AI workloads as the X Elite devices, the X Plus is designed to be a lower-powered alternative aimed at the midrange buyer who prioritizes savings over unbridled power.
Qualcomm previously remarked that it’s aiming to hit the $700 PC price line by 2025 and this new X Plus chip is a step in that direction. With current X Elite chips now seeing starting sales prices being cut by a few hundred dollars just a couple of months after release, there is no reason to believe this X Plus chip won’t help fulfill Qualcomm’s aims right around the start of 2025.
