Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon X Plus Chip for PCs with On-Device AI Capabilities

The tech world is abuzz with excitement as American semiconductor giant Qualcomm has unveiled its latest addition to the Snapdragon X family for PCs – the Snapdragon X Plus. This new chip is a more affordable version of the top-end Snapdragon X Elite and is set to revolutionize the PC industry with its on-device AI capabilities.

The Snapdragon X Plus features a powerful 10-core Oryon CPU that promises up to 37% faster CPU performance and up to 54% less power consumption compared to its competitors. What sets this chip apart is its dedicated Qualcomm Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that enables on-device artificial intelligence capabilities. With a staggering 45 trillion operations-per-second (TOPS), Qualcomm boasts that the Hexagon NPU on the Snapdragon X Plus is the world’s fastest NPU for laptops.

Kedar Kondap, senior vice president of compute and gaming at Qualcomm, expressed his excitement about the new chip, stating, “Snapdragon X Plus will power AI-Supercharged PCs that enable even more users to excel as radical new AI experiences emerge in this period of rapid development and deployment.”

To showcase the chip’s impressive NPU performance, Qualcomm previewed select AI-powered apps on PC, including code generation in “Visual Studio Code” from Codegen, music generation from text prompts in Audacity, and automatic language translation into live captions in OBS Studio.

PCs powered by the Snapdragon X Plus and Snapdragon X Elite chipsets are expected to hit the market in mid-2024. While Qualcomm has not disclosed any specific brands working on devices with these new chips, the industry is eagerly anticipating the arrival of these AI-driven PCs that promise to push the boundaries of mobile computing.