Qualcomm guns for Intel, AMD with cheaper 8-core X chips

Not to be outshined by Intel's Lunar Lake launch, Qualcomm on Wednesday rolled out a pair of slimmed-down X chips aimed at cheaper Copilot+ PCs.

Launched ahead of the IFA conference in Berlin, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Plus 8-core features two fewer Oryon cores than the original X Plus launched alongside its flagship X Elite parts back in May.

Despite the lower core count, Qualcomm claims the chips are still plenty potent, boasting up to 61 percent higher single core performance in Geekbench 6.2 compared to Intel's older 12-core Core Ultra 7 155U.

More importantly, the chips boast the same 45 TOPS Hexagon NPU as their siblings, which Qualcomm says will allow them to meet Microsoft's 40 TOPS performance target while undercutting the competition with AI PCs ranging from $700-$900.

The 8-core parts will be available in two SKUs: one clocked at 3.2 GHz capable of boosting to 3.4 GHz on a single core and a more powerful 3.4 GHz version with a single-core boost of 4 GHz. The lower core count does come at the expense of a smaller cache which has been cut down from 42 MB on the 10-core variant to just 30 MB.

Compared to the X Elite and even the 10-core X Plus, Qualcomm has also cut down the 8-core part's Adreno GPU considerably with performance coming in at 1.7-2.1 teraFLOPS of FP32 performance, compared to 3.8-4.6 teraFLOPS on Qualcomm's 10-and 12-core SKUs.

One area where the new chips might have a leg up on Intel is memory capacity. According to Qualcomm's product brief, the chips can support up to 64 GB of memory, twice that of Intel's newly launched Lunar Lake parts, which top out at 32 GB. However, Whether you'll be able to find a notebook with an 8-core X chip and 64 GB is another matter entirely since the LPDDR5x memory used with these chips won't be upgradable.

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Speaking of systems, Qualcomm says the chips will power notebooks from Acer, Asus, Dell Technologies, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung, starting today.

Since their debut this May, Qualcomm's X-series SoCs have enjoyed widespread adoption by OEMs, with the chips even finding their way into premium thin and lite notebooks like Dell's XPS 13. This was no doubt helped by the fact that the chips were the first to meet Microsoft's Copilot+ spec.

Since then, competition from Intel and AMD has heated up with the launch of their respective Strix Point and Lunar Lake offerings, which claim higher performance, improved efficiency, and Copilot+ compliant NPUs of their own.

Unfortunately for Qualcomm's x86 competitors, they won't be able to tap into those features until Microsoft flips the switch in November. ®