Snapdragon Elite X, Qualcomm's New Chip Claimed To Be Faster Than Apple Chip

Snapdragon Elite X, will be available on laptops starting next year (photo: twitter qualcomm)

JAKARTA - Qualcomm on Tuesday 24 October provided details about chips for Windows-based laptops from Microsoft that it claims will be faster in some tasks compared to Apple chips for Mac computers.

Qualcomm executives say their new chip, Snapdragon Elite X, will be available on laptops starting next year and has been redesigned to handle artificial intelligence tasks such as encapsulating emails, writing text, and producing images.

This artificial intelligence feature will also be an important factor in Qualcomm chips for smartphones, where Google and Meta both said Tuesday that they plan to take advantage of them.

The announcement comes a day after Reuters reported that Microsoft had pushed Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to create new chips to deal with various new AI features in Windows, the world's most popular PC operating system.

During a video appearance at Qualcomm event, Microsoft's Chief Executive, Satya Nadella, said that this chip would help introduce a new era of "AI PC" for businesses and consumers.

"The work we do together will unite experiences that cannot be done without the architecture of the new system," Nadella said.

Qualcomm will be the first to enter the chip market to challenge Apple, where its laptop and desktop computers have more than doubled its market share since the iPhone maker introduced a custom-designed chip in 2020.

Qualcomm claimed Tuesday that X Elite was faster than Apple's M2 Max chip in several tasks and more energy efficient than both Apple and Intel PC chips.

However, Qualcomm Senior Vice President Alex Katouzian said the biggest new feature is the ability of this chip to handle artificial intelligence models with 13 billion parameters, a proxy measure of complexity for AI systems that generate text or images.

Francis Sideco, an analyst with TIRIAS Research, said that where companies like Adobe that release the ability to use AI to produce images for everything from real estate brochures to beer can labels, demand for laptops with AI capabilities will increase.

"You have a lot of small businesses and individual designers who use these devices. They need this kind of capability," Sideco said, quoted by VOI from Reuters.