Qualcomm isn’t stopping at just Elite on its arm-based war against the best MacBooks, as the company has just announced the Snapdragon X Plus — a lower-end option that packs impressive performance and power efficiency, that is also a tad faster than Apple M3.
You can expect to see these Qualcomm-equipped machines drop from top laptop manufacturers in mid-2024, and rumors are pointing toward Lenovo and Microsoft being the first companies to jump on this silicon.
So what are the differences between this and the Snapdragon X Elite? Let’s get into it.
Cutbacks in the name of efficiency
To bring the cost down and make this the lower-tier chip compared to the Snapdragon X Elite, two key changes have been made — the amount of cores for multi-threaded performance has gone down from 12 to 10, and there is no Dual-Core Boost frequency available to boost the speed of those complex tasks.
Beyond that, rather impressively, a lot of the chip’s specs remain very similar to what the Elite has: 45 Trillion Operations Per Second (TOPS) of AI performance via the NPU, 3.8GHz of GPU power, and a 42MB total cache.
For context, this continues to be a more potent NPU than what you can even find in the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H, so this should show you how serious Qualcomm is about AI. In fact, it is the only Windows laptop chip that could be able to run Copilot locally.
X (Plus) gon’ give it to ya
So we’ve got past the intricacies, let’s answer the simple question: what do these specs mean for you, the laptop user? Qualcomm promises a couple of vague numbers: a “37% faster CPU,” while consuming “up to 54% less power.”
We tested the performance of this chip for ourselves with a spot of Geekbench 6 benchmarking, and here’s what we found out.
| Chip (laptop) | Geekbench 6 (single-core) | Geekbench 6 (multicore) |
|---|---|---|
| Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus (Reference design laptop) | 2408 | 13015 |
| Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite (Reference design laptop) | 2864 | 15016 |
| M3 (MacBook Air) | 3082 | 12087 |
| M3 Pro (MacBook Pro) | 3154 | 14357 |
| M3 Max (MacBook Pro) | 3200 | 21711 |
| Intel Core Ultra 7 155H (Asus Zenbook Duo) | 2475 | 12867 |
| Intel Core Ultra 9 185H (Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra) | 2421 | 13124 |
While the gap in that multi-core performance is a little closer to the competition and it doesn’t hold a candle to the souped-up M3 Pro and M3 Max (as expected with this being the lower-end Snapdragon) the X Plus continues to be faster than the M3 found in the new MacBook Air and iMac.
You can also see the mid-tier Windows laptop market this chip is aiming for too, as the numbers are far closer in competition to the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H in the Asus Zenbook Duo, whereas the Ultra 9 185H in the Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Ultra pips it to the post.
Put simply, there’s a lot to be excited about when it comes to performance and longevity potential of the Snapdragon X Plus — especially if the price is right and the laptops that feature these (set to drop in a couple of months).
More from Tom's Guide
- Qualcomm says Snapdragon X Elite blows away Apple’s M3 chip with 28% faster performance
- M4 MacBooks: Everything we know so far
- Huge sale on M3 MacBooks and iMacs at Amazon right now — here’s the 5 deals I’d buy
