[News] Qualcomm Advances into AI PC Market, Reportedly Adopting 4nm Process

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Qualcomm is actively entering the AI PC market with a new processor unveiled on April 25th, reportedly featuring Arm architecture and produced on a 4nm process, igniting a new battle in non-x86 architecture AI PC processors.

Industry sources cited by the report from Economic Daily News have anticipated that TSMC is behind this new chip from Qualcomm. Following this trend, major players like Apple, NVIDIA, and MediaTek will continue to release Arm-based AI PC processors, all likely manufactured by TSMC.

Since 2018, Qualcomm has introduced a series of chips like Snapdragon 8cx, 7c, 8c platforms, 8cx Gen 2, and 8cx Gen 3, targeting always-connected and mobile PC domains. After years of preparation, they’re capitalizing on the AI wave, with last year’s launch of Snapdragon X Elite, produced on TSMC’s 4nm process. Yesterday, they further expanded with Snapdragon X Plus, aiming for a larger share of the AI PC market.

Qualcomm claims both Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus feature customized integrated Oryon CPUs, outperforming competitors with 37% higher CPU performance and a 54% reduction in power consumption. During last year’s Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm introduced its in-house Oryon CPU, claiming that certain CPU performance metrics surpassed those of Intel and Apple chips.

Qualcomm previously mentioned that part of the Snapdragon X Elite’s GPU performance also surpasses competitors like AMD. Both Snapdragon X chips feature Hexagon neural network processors (NPU) capable of 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS), promising unprecedented performance, energy efficiency, and on-device AI capabilities for more Windows PCs.

Qualcomm emphasizes that the NPU’s performance supports new AI-optimized applications and features, including OBS Studio real-time captions, leveraging on-device Whisper functionality to instantly translate 100 spoken languages into 100 languages for live broadcasts.

According to Qualcomm’s official website, the Snapdragon X Elite features 12 cores with a maximum multi-thread frequency of 3.8 GHz, while the Snapdragon X Plus has 10 cores with a maximum frequency of 3.4 GHz.

Industry sources cited by the same report from Economic Daily News believe the Snapdragon X Plus will help Qualcomm capture the PC mainstream market. Qualcomm stated that OEMs are expected to launch PCs equipped with Snapdragon X Plus and Snapdragon X Elite starting from mid this year.

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(Photo credit: Qualcomm)