Qualcomm announces a new processor – Snapdragon X Plus for budget laptops

Qualcomm has announced a new processor – Snapdragon X Plus – for budget laptops, and also provided additional information about the previously announced Snapdragon X Elite chips, The Verge reports.

The Snapdragon X Plus will have 10 cores, 42 MB of cache, a maximum multi-threaded frequency of 3.4 GHz, and an NPU with 45 terra operations per second (TOPS, or how many math calculations it can perform per second).

It’s worth noting that TOPS is an arbitrary metric that can sound more impressive than it actually is, as it doesn’t necessarily take into account the type or quality of those calculations.

The Snapdragon X Plus will also support LPDDR5x memory with a maximum transfer rate of 8448 Mbps and will have an integrated Adreno 3.8 teraflop (TFLOP) GPU. TFLOP is also a mathematical value that shows how many trillions of floating point operations a processor can calculate per second.

The company also announced that it will release three 12-core Snapdragon X Elite processors with a maximum multi-threaded frequency of up to 3.8 GHz and up to 4.6 TFLOP iGPUs. All three models will have the same NPU and support the same memory at the same speed as the Snapdragon X Plus.

The top two models will feature what Qualcomm calls Dual-Core Boost technology, up to 4.2 GHz. This feature will dynamically adjust the frequency of the processor, providing it with more power only when it needs it.

Qualcomm claims that all Snapdragon X cores are “performance cores” and that they still outperform Apple, Intel, and AMD in terms of performance, energy efficiency, and battery life.