Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite: 4.6 TFLOPs = more GPU power than Xbox Series S

Qualcomm's next-gen Snapdragon X has been teased before, but now we're getting the nitty gritty of the specs, the official name, and what this new SoC can really do, thanks to new leaks.

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The new Qualcomm Snapdragon X SoC is the first step in a new family of chips that are built for Windows, and with it comes a new name: the Snapdragon X Elite SoC, Elite meaning it's, well, elite. Qualcomm is using new high-performance Oryon cores and a seriously beefed-up Adreno GPU.

Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite SoC is built on TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) and its new 4nm process node, with 12 of Qualcomm's new Oryon CPU cores at up to 3.8GHz, while single- and dual-core boosts will see the Oryon CPU at up to 4.3GHz. Meanwhile, the updated Adreno GPU now packs 4.6 TFLOPs of FP32 compute performance, meaning it has greater GPU performance than the Xbox Series X... now we're talking.

We have support for up to a whopping 64GB of LPDDR5X-8533 memory with up to 136GB/sec of memory bandwidth; for storage, there's NVMe SSD over PCIe Gen4 as well as SD 3.0 and UFS 4.0 support, while the GPU can handle display output configurations that match a desktop PC.

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Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC (source: WindowsReport)

Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite SoC offers up to a maximum of 3 external displays through DisplayPort 1.4 while supporting a maximum of up to 4K 120Hz with HDR10. But the SoC is also offering up to 4K 60Hz with HDR10, as well as 2 x 5K 60Hz displays. So that would be 1 x 4K, and 2 x 5K displays out of a Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptop.

Yeah, Qualcomm's new SoC can handle some seriously powerful -- as in bandwidth-hungry -- multiple monitors with high native resolutions like 3 x 4K monitors out of an SoC.

Qualcomm is also providing next-gen connectivity with not only lighting-fast 5G, but Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 are also inside of the Snapdragon X Elite SoC. The Video Processing Unit has also been improved, now packing AV1 encoding and decoding, something it hasn't had before.

There's even support for the new USB 4 standard on the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC, with up to 3 x USB 4 ports supported, with USB 3.2 Gen2 and eUSB2 also supported on the new SoC.

It also wouldn't be a new chip without AI something, with Qualcomm supporting generative AI through its Hexgon NPU (Neural Processing Unit), which has up to 45 TOPS (trillions of operations per second). The previous-gen 8cx Gen3 SoC didn't have anywhere near the NPU power of the new Snapdragon X Elite, which is 55% faster in this alone.