In the market for a new Windows machine? You might want to hold out for a little longer. Qualcomm has shared details about its upcoming Snapdragon X series of chipsets for PCs. The new chips use Oryon CPUs for some of the fastest speeds around. It’ll be a big upgrade for power inside your next desktop or laptop, and is looking to rival Apple’s M-series of chips in the latest Macs.
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Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X series of chips are SoC processors. This means that all the components are on the same board: CPU, GPU, the lot. It means things happen on your machine quicker, as components are closer together. Apple has been using chipsets just like these since it unveiled the M-series with the 2020 MacBook Air. And from these Mac machines, the benefits of SoC silicon are unrivalled, producing some of the fastest speeds around.
For the Snapdragon X series, Qualcomm will use Oryon CPUs – some of the latest available. This promises some impressive speeds when you start tackling work on machines using the new chipset. Qualcomm is also cramming in a neural processing unit. This is a dedicated bit of hardware designed to process AI tasks on-device. It’s quicker and more efficient, which should boost your performance even more. Senior VP, Don McGuire, describes it as “a quantum leap forward in performance and power efficiency.”
Based on rumours from WinFuture, Qualcomm will release three chip models: 8, 10, and 12 CPU cores. The most premium version is set to pack 8 performance cores and 4 efficiency cores, which is a direct rival to Apple’s M2 Max processor in the latest MacBook Pros. Expect some major competition here.
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