Microsoft has yet to reveal its Surface machines with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Plus. It will happen on May 20.
“Faster than Apple M3” – will compete with servers as well
But Qualcomm continues marketing the two chips, including the somewhat weaker Plus version, which they still believe is 10 percent faster than the Apple M3. In short: it will be very exciting to test these machines and see how they do in the market this winter after the launch this summer.
But the two consumer chips are just the beginning: Qualcomm has bigger plans, and could change the PC market, which until now has been dominated by Intel and Apple, with a dash of AMD. Because not only has another Plus model been revealed, but Android Authority has also revealed that there will be server chips.
80 cores
You may remember that Apple will make efficient servers with its own 3 nm chips? The Android blog has revealed server chips based on Oryon cores called “SD1:”
- 80 Oryon cores at up to 3.8 GHz
- 16 channels with DDR5 up to 5600MHz
- 70 PCIe 5.0 lanes
- CXL v1.1 support
- 9470-pin LGA socket (98.0×95.0 mm)
- Support for a two-socket configuration
- Built on TSMC’s 5nm process (N5P)
Qualcomm should have notified its partners about the new product already late in 2021 or early the following year. With such concrete information, there is little to suggest that it is not true, and as Microsoft’s first with Windows ARM, Qualcomm is trying again after the “Centriq” server chips were canceled in 2017.
Our frustration is quite great with Windows laptops that use Intel chips where even the 14th generation CPUs behave in many ways as old fashioned. We’ll be back with a test later today, and are very excited to see what the Snapdragon X series can bring to the market.
Surface Laptop 6 numbers revealed
From before, we have seen GeekBench numbers which reveal that the chips look very promising. Now there is battery testing that remains, but before we get the chance to do that, several Surface Laptop 6 tests have leaked. The numbers reveal up to 14,100 multi-core points and up to 2,745 single-core points.
See below for some of our GeekBench tests, including for the new Samsung Galaxy Book4 Pro (Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU) and Ultra (Intel Core Ultra 9 CPU 185H) which are several thousand points behind in the multi-core test – ditto for the MacBook Air with M3. The chip is also GPU faster than Intel’s new Core i7 155h.
- Galaxy Book4 Pro: 2232 – 11,201
- Galaxy Book4 Ultra: 2,466 – 12,450
- Asus Zenbook Duo: 2331 – 11,059
- MacBook Air M3: 3,064 – 11,716
- MacBook Air M2 1TB: 2500 – 9600 – M2 10 cores GPU OpenCL: 27,593
- MacBook Air M1: 1705 – 7515
- Dell XPS 15″ 9510: 1658 – 8880 – GeForce RTX 3050 Ti 4GB GDDR6 OpenCL: 35,517
- MacBook Pro 14 (base model – 8 CPU cores 14 cores): 1750 – 9857
- Galaxy Book2 Pro 360: 1664 – 8449
- Surface Laptop Studio: 1563 – 5778
- Tab P12 Pro: 955 – 3089
- Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra: 1229 – 3380
