MAUI, HAWAII — At this year’s Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm released its most formidable PC processor yet. The Snapdragon X Elite, which is designed to run Windows, will provide real competition to AMD and Intel for notebook PCs.

This newest Snapdragon will breathe fire, with 12 high-performance custom Arm-compatible CPUs that can run up to 4.3 GHz (although not all at once).

Qualcomm also loaded the monolithic chip with a new high-performance Hexagon neural processing unit (NPU). The Hexagon processor is capable of up to 45 TOPS of INT8 AI performance and can run large language models (LLMs) for generative AI applications. Together, the CPU, GPU and NPU—which Qualcomm refers to as the AI Engine—are capable of 75 TOPS of INT8 AI performance.

For Qualcomm, its partnership with Microsoft has been a strategic market extension of its traditional smartphone and mobile business.

 ----Form EE Times