Qualcomm To Introduce Affordable ARM-Based Notebooks At The IFA Trade Show

Qualcomm Said To Introduce Even More Affordable ARM-Based Notebooks At The IFA Trade Show

The Snapdragon X Elite has started to be featured in a bevy of notebooks, with various reviews stating that the latest ARM-based Windows machines hit the mark in various areas but miss in others by a long shot. One complaint was that these products are a little on the pricey side, making potential buyers contemplate an Apple Silicon MacBook purchase. Fortunately, Qualcomm aims to tackle this problem by introducing a wave of notebooks powered by the Snapdragon X Plus next month at the IFA trade show, and best of all, these will start from just $800.

Currently, the Snapdragon X Plus that was introduced a short while ago comes with a 10-core CPU and a 3.40GHz clock speed. According to notable leakster Evan Blass, Qualcomm will announce an 8-core version of the same chipset at the IFA trade show and power notebooks at the $800 price bracket. The San Diego firm’s CEO, Christiano Amon, previously stated during the company’s last earnings call that it will proceed with a more aggressive pricing structure of $700, enabling a higher adoption of the Windows-powered ARM notebooks in multiple markets.

For the 8-core Snapdragon X Plus, the SoC may feature four performance and four efficiency cores, resulting in lowered multi-core performance compared to the 10-core variant, but the reduced power budget means that it can potentially deliver increased battery life. The Snapdragon X Plus is mass produced on TSMC’s 4nm process as Qualcomm’s other two chipsets, with the post below revealing an Adreno GPU rated at 1.7TFLOPS instead of 3.8TFLOPS and 30MB of total cache compared to 42MB on the higher-binned Snapdragon X Plus.

There were naturally going to be some stark differences between the 10-core version of the Snapdragon X Plus and the 8-core one, so it will be interesting to see if the lowered specifications will have any real-world drawbacks when the chip is found in a boatload of Windows laptops. What would truly be impressive is if the aforementioned $800 price tag offers 16GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD space as standard, giving Qualcomm a massive opportunity to penetrate the market. However, time will tell if the company’s partners share the same plan.