Snapdragon X Elite Core Architecture Revealed, There Are Surprising Findings

Snapdragon X Elite uses the 4nm manufacturing process of TSMC (photo: x @techolay)

JAKARTA - The Snapdragon X Elite, launched in June this year, has attracted attention due to its extraordinary power efficiency compared to Intel chips. This ARM-based chipset offers a much longer battery life and allows for thinner and lighter laptop designs as it does not require a large cooling system. However, technical details about this chipset have recently been revealed and compared to Apple M4, yielding exciting findings.

Snapdragon X Elite has a core size of 169.6 square millimeters, nearly the same as Apple M4. Even so, Snapdragon X Elite uses the 4nm manufacturing process of TSMC, while Apple M4 is based on 3nm processes. This allows Apple M4 to have more transistors per square millimeter compared to Snapdragon, which theoretically provides better performance and energy efficiency. However, the differences in performance and energy efficiency between these two chips turn out to be not so significant.

Other key factors, such as architecture and design options, also have a major influence on performance. For example, CPU core designs, cache sizes, clock speeds, and the use of AI accelerators also affect the performance of chipsets.

The Snapdragon X Elite is equipped with up to 12 Oryon CPU cores called Phoenix, with an area of 2.55mm2 per nucleus. Although this size is slightly smaller than the Apple M4 performance core, the design and optimization implemented results in high efficiency. Each core is equipped with 192KB L1 cache instruction and 96KB L1 cache data, with four cores sharing 12MB L2 cache.

However, interestingly, although the Snapdragon X Elite CPU cluster takes up more space, the Adreno X1 GPU actually has a smaller size, only 24.3mm2, which is 25% smaller than the GPU in Apple M4.

With the disclosure of this architecture, Snapdragon X Elite shows how Qualcomm has succeeded in creating chips with high power efficiency despite using a slightly older manufacturing process than its competitors.