In September 2023, Qualcomm announced plans to launch a whole new family of Arm-based CPUs specifically for Windows devices, called the Snapdragon X Series. In October, it revealed the first of these new chips, the Snapdragon X Elite.
Qualcomm has been promoting the Snapdragon X Elite as the "most powerful, intelligent, and efficient processor" for Windows PCs. The Elite processor has already scored most of the major PC makers, including HP, Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, and even Microsoft, who have all said they will make PCs with the chip inside for future products. The first PCs with these chips are expected to launch sometime this summer.
However, a new report from the German language site WinFuture says it has found evidence that Qualcomm is already working on another chip in the Snapdragon X Series. The chip is reportedly being labeled as the Snapdragon X Plus.
The story says that Qualcomm has been testing two versions of the Snapdragon X Plus chip for a number of months, with the version numbers X1P44100 and X1P46100. Both chips allegedly include the Snapdragon X65 5G modem. The story speculates these new chips will have 10 cores inside, compared to the 12 cores that will be available on the Snapdragon X Elite.
There"s no other word on the hardware specs of these chips, nor is there info on when they might show up inside a Windows 11 notebook. So far, Qualcomm has not confirmed any plans for more Snapdragon X chips beyond the Elite model so take this report with a grain of salt for now.
Recently, Qualcomm has been promoting how well the Snapdragon X Elite will handle high-end PC games. During the recent 2024 edition of the Game Developers Conference, one of Qualcomm"s engineers said that running games with emulation software should allow most of them to "just work" with little need for extra optimizations.