Earlier this week, Qualcomm officially announced the first hardware details of the upcoming Snapdragon XElite, the first version of its new Snapdragon X-series PC CPU. Now, the company has confirmed that at least nine PC manufacturers will use Snapdragon XElite in their upcoming Windows laptops.
The list was revealed on the second day of the Qualcomm Summit 2023, which was broadcast live on Wednesday. Near the end of the presentation, a slide showed the PC manufacturers that will adopt Snapdragon XElite CPUs.
Microsoft is also among the companies that will feature new Arm processors in one or more future versions of its Surface laptops and tablets. The company previously used Arm-based CPUs in the Surface Pro 9 5G and Surface Pro X tablets.
Other PCOEM vendors that will join Microsoft in including Snapdragon XElite chips in their upcoming laptops or tablets include Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Honor, Lenovo, Samsung and Xiaomi. These companies, which represent most of the major PC manufacturers, appear to be ensuring that Qualcomm's new CPUs take off in the PC market.
SnapdragonXElite CPU will include 12 high-performance cores with a maximum frequency of 3.8GHz. Qualcomm also claims that one or two of the cores can run faster, up to 4.3GHz. Qualcomm showed charts showing that its new CPUs will perform twice as well as Intel's i7-1360P and i7-1355U chips at maximum power, and achieve comparable performance while using 68% less power.
The new chip will also integrate Adreno GPU and artificial intelligence-themed neural processing unit, as well as 5G modem and Wi-Fi7 hardware. The first batch of PCs powered by Snapdragon XElite are scheduled to begin shipping in mid-2024.